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Last Friday, Kayla Higginbotham accepted a ride from a nice guy in a sweet car. But it wasn’t just any nice guy. It was extreme sports star Travis Pastrana, in his top-of-the-line rally car.
Higginbotham and 2,500 other students from across the U. S. were given 60 minutes of raw video from Pastrana’s motocross and rally car racing career to edit into a highlight reel of less than three minutes. The public chose ten finalists on the Red Bull Web site, and in May, Red Bull announced that Higginbotham’s nearly two-minute video was the winner.
The eight-minute rally car ride and opportunity to meet him were her only prizes, but Higginbotham said it was well worth it.
“It was just like a day that never ended, and that I never wanted to end,” she said.
Travis Pastrana is an extreme sports star and stunt performer who has been racing motocross since the age of 4 and rally racing since 2003. His most spectacular crash was in 2005, when he rolled his Subaru rally car seven and a half times and walked away unhurt.
Although Higginbotham said she had reason to feel concerned when she rode in the car with Pastrana on Friday, she didn’t scream once. He noticed, and was disappointed.
Higginbotham said he told her he didn’t feel as though he did his job because she wasn’t scared.
Higginbotham said her participation in the contest started off as a simple, fun thing to do. She had only watched rally racing one or two times before, but said she was familiar with motocross because of its inclusion in the X-games. She said she knew that Travis Pastrana was a rising star, but was not familiar with his work as a rally racer.
