Aston Martin Red Bull Racing is doing no-gravity pit stops now

The pit crew over at Aston Martin Red Bull motorsport must be getting next-level bored. Perfect is unattainable, but they’ve been nearly that throughout the season. They set the record for fastest F1 pit stop not once, not twice, but three times this year, and it doesn’t seem the current time of 1.82 seconds will last long. Like Michael Jordan shooting a free throw with his eyes closed, the pit crew decided to take something away to increase the challenge. This is the zero-gravity pit stop.

Red Bull has a history of doing the craziest stunts possible, and its motorsport division has been no exception. Throughout the years, Red Bull’s F1 car has participated in burnouts on top of skyscrapers, ski slope time trials, a rugby scrum against real rugby players, and a road trip across the United States. But all of those events had one thing in common: the rubber stayed on the ground. Not this time. 

For absolutely no reason at all, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing partnered up with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to get an F1 car floating in the air. For the shoot, they used an Ilyushin Il-76 MDK cosmonaut training plane as the sealed-off capsule and a 2005-spec Red Bull RB1. The project was shot in a week’s time using Arri Alexa Mini cameras with anamorphic lenses, DSLRs, and a few action cameras.

Even in the difficult conditions, a goal time was still set. The team needed to get it done in less than 20 seconds, a literally laughable time compared to the sub-2.0-second flashes the mechanics are used to. Check out the full video above and read more about how the project came to be on Red Bull’s dedicated landing page.