Man Breaks Back Jumping Ford F-150 Raptor

Give a man a Ford F-150 Raptor, and he’ll have a good time. Give a man a Raptor and a camera, and he’ll find a way to make a big mess and post it on the internet. That’s the case with a guy named Caz, who found out the hard way that making high-speed jumps in a personal pickup truck can end with disastrous results. His stunt broke his back and gave him a much-needed wake up call for self-preservation

Caz posted his misfortunate incident to Instagram with the caption “How to break your back in a new Gen 3! My dumbass decided to overdo it with a stock suspension and now I have a T12 compression fracture. I’ll be taking a break from jumping for the rest of the year.”

Caz’s injuries happened during an off-road run on the dirt track at Virginia International Raceway. It was an event with several Ford and Ram trucks, and drivers were testing the limits of their pickups at high speeds over a dirt jump. He overshot the speed and came down flat-footed on the landing. The Raptor comes with beefy Fox shocks and can take a beating, but it can’t fix everything. His high-speed jump looks standard enough as he hit the ramp, but on the landing, the truck landed flat on all four wheels. The impact broke his back and sent him to the hospital in need of surgery.

Despite people at the event seeing Caz’s injuries, he updated his Instagram post to say that another driver attempted the same thing and got the same, albeit less severe, result. The second stuntman tackled the jump at 60 mph and also pancaked the landing, but only received a hairline fracture instead of a shattered vertebra.

These sorts of activities frequently go sideways, especially on the internet, but two things stick out about Caz’s story. First, he was jumping at an actual event at a legitimate motorsport facility, not some bootleg track in a field or backroad. So many times, people destroy their vehicles, themselves, or private property, pulling stunts where they shouldn’t.

The second is that Caz is remarkably candid about what happened and appears to accept at least partial responsibility for his injuries. In his Instagram post, he notes that he was silly to overdo the jump, and admits that the second driver is in better shape than he is. For now, Caz can be thankful that he’s not paralyzed.