Stunt Jump Simulator: Real Car Physics for Ramps, Gaps and Landings
A free stunt jump simulator with real car physics: suspension, tyre grip, engine power and air drag. Jump cars, bikes and monster trucks over gaps and canyons, see airtime, rotation and landing g-force, and find the speed window for a clean landing.
Pick a car and a jump, press Go. The car is a real physics model: springs and dampers on each axle, tyre grip, engine power, air drag, and wheels whose spin turns the body in the air. It takes off, rotates, lands and either rolls away or wrecks, with the g-force the driver would feel.
Find the right speed
The path
Height against distance, coloured by speed. The dashed line is your best landing on this jump.
What the driver feels
g-force against time. 1 g is sitting still, 0 g is weightless in the air; above 6 g is a hard landing, above 12 g brutal.
Your jumps
| # | Vehicle | Takeoff | Angle | Airtime | Distance | Landing | Result |
|---|
The textbook version: a point flying off a ramp, with or without air drag. No rotation, no suspension, so it is the best case. The simulator tab shows what a real car adds.
The flight
The equations
Unofficial fan tools by MES. Not made by, endorsed by or connected with Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive. Grand Theft Auto and GTA are their trademarks.
A stunt jump simulator with real car physics
Most jump calculators treat the car as a dot flying along a parabola. This one simulates the whole car: a rigid body with its weight, length and centre of mass, a spring and damper on each axle (with the soft-then-firm valving real shock absorbers have), tyres that grip only as hard as the load on them allows, an engine with a real power limit, brakes, and air drag. It runs 500 physics steps per second, and the felt g-force is filtered over 25 milliseconds, the way crash-test sensors are read.
Why cars nose-dive off ramps
At the lip the front wheels leave first while the rear wheels are still pushing up, so for a split second the car pivots over the edge and starts rotating nose-down. A free-flying car keeps rotating at that rate until it lands. That is why real stunt cars carry weight in the back, and why landing ramps work: the car lands nose-down, so the landing has to slope down too.
Why car-jump ramps are straight at the lip
A curved kicker squashes the suspension as the car follows the curve. When the front wheels leave the lip, the still-squashed rear springs kick the tail up (motocross riders call it bucking), and the car can nose-dive into a flip. Try the Why car ramps are straight example. Long, straight ramps let the suspension settle before takeoff.
Turning the car in the air (real physics)
With nothing to push against, a car in the air can only turn by spinning something inside it the other way. Speeding the wheels up (gas) turns the body nose-up; braking them turns it nose-down. Motocross riders use exactly this. In a car the effect is small, on a bike it is big. The game-style air control option is the unrealistic version that games use.
Why the landing matters more than the jump
Landing on flat ground turns all the falling speed into a stop over a few centimetres of suspension travel, which is why it shows 8 to 20 g. Landing on a slope that matches the car's angle of descent turns most of that speed into rolling down the slope instead. Stunt crews set the takeoff speed to within a few km/h for exactly this reason: use Find the right speed to see how narrow the window is.
Questions
- What counts as a clean landing?
- Wheels first and under 6 g at the driver's seat. 6 to 12 g is hard (it hurts, and the car may be damaged), 12 to 20 g is brutal (injuries likely), and above that, or landing on the body, roof or in the water, is a wreck.
- How accurate is it?
- The physics is real but simplified: it is a 2D side view, the tyres are not separately modelled as springs, the body is rigid and does not crumple, and the vehicles are typical, not specific models. It shows the right effects and the right orders of magnitude, not exact numbers for your car.
- Is this from GTA?
- No. It is an unofficial fan tool by MES with original vehicles and ramps, made for fun and for learning the physics. It is not connected with Rockstar Games.
- Can I share a jump?
- Yes: Copy link to this jump makes a link with the vehicle, speed and every ramp setting in it.
- Keyboard controls?
- Click the picture, then Space starts and pauses, R resets, ↑ is gas and ↓ is brake (in Drive mode, and in the air in any mode), ← and → tilt when game-style air control is on.