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Don’t Look Down: Kriss Kyle reveals how he rode BMX 2,000ft in the sky
BMX legend Kriss Kyle reveals the whole story of his boundary-pushing BMX project, Don’t Look Down, where he rides a BMX bowl suspended under a hot air balloon.
From wall rides to heli-drops, to a skatepark that's an optical illusion, British BMXer Kriss Kyle's past edits have pushed the boundaries of what's possible on a BMX. Always keen to go that one step further, Kyle, who hails from Scotland, one day thought about what it would be like to ride a skatepark in the air, and so the Don't Look Down project was born. His biggest project since Kaleidoscope.
Dream would become reality and Kyle would eventually embark to the skies to ride a skatepark bowl suspended by a humongous hot air balloon 2,000ft (610m) in the air. When starting the project, little did Kyle know the level of complexity, man hours and sheer force of will that would be required to turn his fantasy into a reality.
Jumping out of a helicopter on a BMX? Completed it
© Fred Murray
Watch the riding edit in the player at the top of the page and then watch the documentary that tells the story of the Don't Look Down project below. Scroll down to read about what Kyle thought about the project in his own words as well as taking a look at the behind-the-scenes build of the skatepark bowl.
36 minuta
Don't Look Down
Riding a BMX park 2,000ft in the air? Daring BMXer Kriss Kyle just did that, so you don't have to.
01
The impossible dream
I was mountain biking up this horrible hill behind my house. It was a beautiful day – blue sky and pure sun. A thought popped into my head – ’imagine riding a skatepark up in the air’.
I first thought you could hang it under a Chinook helicopter, but when I dropped out of a much smaller helicopter in Dubai it was like jumping into a tornado.
Kyle's early thoughts on how Don't Look Down could work
© Kriss Kyle
My next thought was ‘what can you fly that gives off no wind?’. It had to be a hot air balloon. I was visualising it as I was pedalling up and quickly put it down in my notes on my phone before continuing on my ride. When I got home, I sketched up a hot air balloon with a bowl and a stickman underneath it.
Imagine riding a skatepark up in the air
02
Enter Oracle Red Bull Racing
I trust my build crew with my life. I wanted to cram as many BMX park features as we could into the bowl, but it’s okay because I like riding tight, weird stuff. They built me a prototype out of wood which ticked all the boxes, but it weighed six tonnes.
We needed something that was light enough for the balloon to carry – it would be some bit of aeronautical engineering. Enter Oracle Red Bull Racing and their commercial arm Red Bull Advanced Technologies (RBAT). The Formula 1 engineers usually spend their time designing parts for Max Verstappen’s F1 car. Instead, they set to work designing something that matched the wooden bowl for shape but significantly shaved the weight.
The skatepark bowl in miniature form
© Eisa Bakos
It was amazing to see the worlds of BMX and F1 collide. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work alongside them and pretty surreal to go to the factory in Milton Keynes, see how it was made, and really get an insight on how engineering feats like these are done. But how would carbon fibre ride?
Bowl Facts
The bowl was constructed from 22 sections
Each part couldn’t be heavier than 150kg so that it could be lifted by hand
Each section couldn’t be any wider than 3m to be able to go through gates so that the bowl could be built and disassembled in fields
The thickness of the carbon was tailored to the different sections, ensuring the ultimate strength-to-weight ratio
The bowl and its frame had to be below 2.9 tonnes
The carbon is fundamentally the same as that used for the bodywork of Max Verstappen’s F1 car
The finish had to be a certain roughness for grip but not so abrasive that it would scratch Kriss if he fell off
For more details on Red Bull Advanced Technologies (RBAT) involvement in the Don't Look Down, scroll on down the story.
03
Like riding on a trampoline
At 2.6 tonnes, the carbon fibre bowl was now light enough for the balloon to carry, but riding on it was really weird. It flexed so much that when I first got on it, I ran down it on my feet and the flat was like a trampoline – not what you want as a BMX rider.
It rolled faster than concrete and wood, which was good for me as it meant I could get even more air than normal. But it was hard to get used to that spring and pop – it's such a strange feeling. After getting it as dialled as I could on the ground, it was time to raise the bar, but there was another obstacle to tackle first.
The carbon-fibre bowl was finished in vinyl to add grip
© Eisa Bakos
"It made a lot of noise – if you landed flat, you knew about it"
© Eisa Bakos
04
A weight on my shoulders
The team said ‘you're going to need to wear an emergency parachute’ – 2,000ft (610m) is a long way to fall without one. I was totally fine with the prospect of riding with it until it arrived. The box was so heavy that I thought it was a couple of cases of Red Bull. It weighs more than 20 percent of my own body weight.
Trying to ride with the parachute was a massive obstacle. You have to pull so much harder than I ever could have imagined. The weight isn't really spread around – it sits solely on my back. When doing flairs and flips and spins, I need to pull so much harder just to get around. I’m fighting against it the whole time and the ‘chute just wants to do its own thing.
Kyle getting used to riding with a parachute
© Eisa Bakos
I practised riding with it in Unit 23 skatepark and the wooden bowl but it never got any easier. I even asked my manager if I had to ride with it because I was so worried that it would stop me from landing all of my planned lines. Accepting it as an unforeseen difficulty, it was time to finally get the project off the ground (literally).
Trying to ride with the parachute was a massive obstacle. You have to pull so much harder than I ever could have imagined
05
A big setback
The first time we got the bowl suspended in the air, it moved every way you can imagine. It was tilting, it was side-to-side, it was going round and round in circles. You need to learn that it rides differently on all sides and it's just so hard to get your head around.
After that first day, I was mentally exhausted and I felt sick just from the motion of it. It was a big step back and thinking ‘oh shit, is this going to be doable, especially up at 2,000 feet?’. After spending more time, I started to get a bit more used to it.
At some point Kyle thought the project "might not be possible'
© Eisa Bakos
There was definitely light at the end of the tunnel and it was time to stick it beneath the hot air balloon.
06
Lift-off (just about)
Before we could take it to the skies, we suspended the bowl beneath the balloon in the hangar. We could only fly it six feet off the ground before the top of the balloon was touching the roof but it was the best it's ever felt. We had to spike to the hot air balloon’s canisters with nitrogen because it wasn’t going up quick enough with normal air.
The bowl still moved, but nowhere near as much as what it did underneath the crane. Knowing that it didn’t move as much as what I’d been practising on really put my mind at ease – I was saying ‘can we open the doors and fly it straight out?’
Testing with the hot air balloon attached
© Eisa Bakos
After that, we were just waiting on the weather. And sure enough, it didn't come around for a long, long time.
Balloon Facts
33.5m – maximum diameter
16,990 cubic meters (600,000 cubic feet) – volume
4,626kg – maximum system mass (balloon, basket, burner, bowl, fuel and passengers) for typical UK weather conditions
Largest hot air balloon seen in Great Britain
It took two hours to get the balloon from the trailer to take off with the bowl
Enough fuel was taken for a flight of two hours
The balloon ‘envelope’ (the proper name for the balloon itself) is made from nylon
The weather window requirements were strict: No rain, and the maximum wind speed was 3 knots for take-off and 5 knots for landing.
07
Riding the dream
After 11 months of waiting and multiple cancelled attempts, the day finally arrived when conditions were right. Eleven months later and after a number of cancelled attempts, conditions were finally good enough for flying.
Time to go to work
© Sam Dugon
Up at 2,000ft (610m), it was so peaceful. I remember looking around and thinking ‘riding this little bike has got me here – just look at everything that's happened’. Riding was absolutely horrendous once again though. It was -12 degrees Celsius, the bowl moved and bounced like never before, while the parachute completely drained my energy.
Now I was up there though, I had a job to do. I didn’t want to simply session the bowl either – I had a hit list of bangers I needed to tick off, including a fakie front flip and a kick off to ice pick on the handrail. What are difficult tricks on the ground became near-impossible at altitude with the added weight of the vest and movement of the bowl underneath me.
The perfect day for a hot balloon ride... with a difference
© Eisa Bakos
A look to see what's down below
© Eisa Bakos
Time to ride in the air, and realise a dream
© Eisa Bakos
The sun was in quite a bad spot at one point, especially when I did the front flip – the vert wall was in the shade and I couldn’t see it so it was like 180-ing into the dark. Up in the basket, they could feel it bouncing.
My drone pilot said ‘I don't know how you're riding this because it's moving up and down about four feet’. You can't see it in the footage because it looks like it's stationary, but it’s moving so much. It's insane but my dream to ride at 2,000ft became a reality.
“Waiting for 11 months made it the hardest project in my life. I had to be on standby for 11 months and there are so many trips that I missed out on. This was my sole thing that my life revolved around.”
It's insane but my dream to ride at 2,000ft became a reality
Now read on for more details on about Red Bull Racing's involvement in Don't Look Down
08
The story behind the build of the Don’t Look Down BMX bowl
Combining BMXing with aeronautics isn't completely new to Kyle, though. The 31-year-old Scottish star has previously experienced dropping out of a helicopter in his Dubai edit. He also knew that riding a ramp in the sky would require a much more gentle, downforce-free mode of transport. But even the biggest hot-air balloon available in Great Britain was unable to lift the load of a traditional steel and wooden skatepark bowl structure.
So Kyle's team approached Red Bull Advanced Technologies (RBAT) and challenged them to significantly reduce the weight of the bowl.
Relaxing in the surroundings of Red Bull Advanced Technologies HQ
© Eisa Bakos
Light enough to be lifted, but strong enough for slams
Kriss first approached RBAT in February 2021. Armed with a CAD model of the bowl that he’d created in collaboration with long-time ramp builder George Eccleston, he needed a way of manufacturing the structure that would keep it rideable but also light enough to be lifted by a balloon.
From left: Kriss, Rob and Andy combined to create the carbon-fibre bowl
© Eisa Bakos
“Weight was the primary thing, and getting it down was a difficult challenge,” explains Rob Gray, RBAT’s Technical Director. The wooden and steel build came in at roughly eight tonnes. For the project to succeed, the bowl and its metalwork (guard rails, bolts) needed to be under 2.9 tonnes.
“Effectively they couldn't get a balloon big enough to lift it,” he adds. “They came to us and said, ‘Can you design a bowl that is light enough that we can lift?’ It goes without saying that it also needs to be strong enough so that when he lands on the bottom of it, he doesn't go straight through it; it has guardrails for the safety side of it; and then as a side requirement, you need to be able to land the thing and not have it fall into a million pieces.”
Technology refined in Formula One was used to create a light enough bowl
© Eisa Bakos
To meet the unique needs of the project, the RBAT team used carbon fibre to build a structure where each section's thickness was tailored to provide overall strength, while also keeping weight at a minimum.
The result is a bowl that weighs in at 1.5 tonnes and an overall structure that is 300kg under the limit.
Piecing together the puzzle
As if the original requirements weren’t restrictive enough, the project posed another challenge for RBAT – each section of the bowl had to be narrow enough to fit through a farmer’s gate. While it might sound like a slightly odd request at first, all becomes clearer when you remember what the bowl is suspended beneath – balloons might take off from a set location, but their landing location is difficult to control.
The bowl needed to be able to be put together and taken apart on the move
© Eisa Bakos
“As it was going to be flown in the countryside, it needed to [be able to] go through a farmer's gate, as most balloons do, so it couldn't be any wider than three metres,” says Andy Damerum, RBAT's Commercial Development Office.
This meant that the bowl would have to be split up into sections, and each would require additional hardware to secure together – impacting overall weight. This delicate balancing act was made even more difficult by the fact that each piece had a maximum weight of 150kg – “you also needed to be able to carry these parts and assemble them in a field,” adds Damerum.
The result was, “effectively a 22-piece jigsaw of carbon parts no more than 100kg.”
The bowl is made out of 22 different sections
© Eisa Bakos
Each join required additional metalwork, which increased the weight
© Eisa Bakos
World Championship-winning carbon fibre
“Fundametally, the carbon fibre is the same [as that used on the Formula One cars],” says Gray. “The race car uses different types of carbon all over. For example, suspension legs have strands of carbon fibre running all the way down their length and very few going around the outside – that gives you a link that's very strong in tension and compression. The bodywork is more of a fabric matt of carbon fibre – it's woven with pieces overlapping each other because that gives you strength in both directions. The vast majority of the bowl is carbon-fibre matt – so it's a fairly generic carbon.”
The material doesn’t extend to the finish of the bowl though, with a vinyl wrap preferred. “It needed to be a certain roughness so that the bike gripped it, but he doesn't grip it so well that if he falls off it takes his skin off,” adds Gray.
