Ride it Until the Wheels Fall Off | Travis Pastrana | Ep. 439
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4.9 • 11.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 153 minutes
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Summary
Travis Pastrana is a 17-time X Games gold medalist, multi-discipline motorsport champion, and the founder of Nitro Circus. He grew up in a Maryland construction family steeped in military service and contact sports, won his first outdoor national championship at 16, bought a house the same year, and has spent the decades since competing in everything from supercross to rally to NASCAR to base jumping. He has had two knee replacements, a hip replacement, over 30 concussions, and once turned 40 fractures across seven bones in his foot into dust on an X Games landing.
We got into what it actually means to make decisions at speed — treating cliffs and trees like traffic cones when everyone else backs off. His Daytona 500 run. The NASCAR race where every teammate crashed out and his daughter read him the riot act for finishing 15th. What happened when a group from a certain Army unit showed up at his place and every single one of them landed a backflip on a dirt bike within two tries. The concussion research that found his brain operates differently than most. His seven-year-old daughter telling him she doesn't want to be the best at anything because the people chasing greatness don't seem happy. And the massive open-air wind tunnel he bought from a Mission Impossible set that he can't afford to power.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, got the red smoke. Gun runs, north and south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, copy, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. I'm all winning, baby. Give it to me. I need it. You're cleared hot. Copy, cleared hot. Let's go more modern day first. I want to hear about... Are we already filming? I don't know. It depends. Michael, did you hit the button? |
| 0:24.6 | Yeah, we're going. Can't be clear hot. Let's go more modern day first. |
| 0:21.1 | I want to hear about... |
| 0:21.7 | Are we already filming? |
| 0:22.7 | I don't know. |
| 0:23.2 | It depends. |
| 0:23.7 | Michael, did you hit the button? Yeah, we're going. Perfect. NASCAR, how to go? That's the most recent thing you did, right? You know, I think my daughter said it the best. So I convinced her to come down to watch this NASCAR race. Anytime you race Daytona, I mean, I won my, I met Evil Can Evil there. I won my first ever Supercross there. |
| 0:40.5 | Daytona's just kind of a special place as far as racing and bike week and everything. Plus it's warm in the winter, so it's where our family can always went. My dad always had a Harley. So my daughter, she either was going to go to cheer to watch her sister or she was going to come down with me to Daytona. |
| 0:56.9 | And she's like, ah, it's a, which didn't seem like a toss up to me, but she's like kind of playing it back and forth. |
| 1:01.4 | She goes, okay. |
| 1:02.3 | She's like, but dad, are you going to be competitive because I know you're really not good? |
| 1:06.5 | No, she's honest. |
| 1:07.6 | Like, rear wheel drive and pavement. |
| 1:09.8 | She's like, you're pretty bad at this. |
| 1:11.6 | Like, am I just going to be bored watching you run around on 15th? |
| 1:14.6 | And I'm thinking 15th will probably be decent for me, but I'm like, no, I'm like, we're |
| 1:18.6 | going to get up there, we're going to get in the fight. |
| 1:19.6 | But our strategy is to stay in the back. |
| 1:22.6 | And while all these guys take each other out, Like the top 10 or so people will generally crash out. So they start with the field of 40, 40, 42, and usually 25 finish in general. So I'm like. This is like the lead up to the lay Mullets that I, this is the brief I got from Bucky. Right. He was like, dude. And if you can just get me a car that isn't jacked, also, by the way, I'm not a good race car driver. |
| 1:46.0 | So I'm like, yeah, I'll hang out in the back non-consensually. |
| 1:57.8 | But you did, we'll get to that in a second. Let's finish this. But what you're describing, though, is the same thing. He was like, dude, they're all, he's like, we're going to start with a bunch of cars. He goes last year, like six finished. |
| 2:04.2 | Now, let's take one step back and say to stay on the lead lap at any event with the best drivers in the world is difficult. |
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