Young Alexander Rossi must love Indianapolis. The IndyCar driver won the Indianapolis 500 this year as a rookie, and in returning to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for Red Bull, got to do something no one there has done before: race a dang airplane. The plane was driven by Red Bull Air Race pilot Kirby Chambliss, and as you can see, the race was more of an exhibition than anything else.
Then again, if you look at the above video and ask, “What’s the point?” then you’ve already missed it. The only way for us to see footage as awesome as a low-flying plane hanging upside down alongside a race car going around 200 miles an hour is for some madmen to say, “Let’s put a plane and a car together and film it because it’ll look awesome.”
The “race” makes up less than half of the video, with the remaining time filled by Rossi and Chambliss taking a ride in the other’s respective vehicle. It’s worth it to stick around to see once Chambliss gets up in the air, because he does some air stunts I’ve never, ever seen before. Flipping end over end in a dive before pulling out and going upside down parallel to the ground? Heart-stopping stuff, and he did it with a first-timer in the cockpit with him — both an extremely uncool and an extremely cool move at once.
