DT S1E3: Pod Racing

On this season of Drone Trippin, AirVūz Pilots Zoe Stumbaugh, Shaun Taylor, Shelby Voll and Colby Curtola head on the road trip of their lives. The pilots travel through scenic destinations across the western USA with FPV whiz, Trey Player, in a droned-out R.V. to test their skills in quad building, freestyle flow, drone racing, and pilot accuracy. What better way to show off those skills than with some Star Wars challenges? See what ZoeFPV as Chewbacca, Nytfury as Kylo Ren, Shelby Voll as Darth Vader, and SFPV as Obi Wan Kanobe can bring to the table and get the scoop on what these pilots are like once the goggles are off!


In this Episode they test out their custom built pod racers for the first time!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Speaker 1: ( [00:00:30] Intro upbeat techno music) This is Drone Trippin, The Canyons of Moab: Part One. Trey Player: I wanna see some cliff diving out here, guys. Look at these walls, man. This is amazing. Speaker 2: [crosstalk 00:00:46] Oh yeah. We gotta hit that. Shelby Voll: It would be awesome if somebody could get up the top, right this ... You know, the first flat part. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. If someone's to crash. [inaudible 00:00:57] A long walk to go back down there to get it. Shelby Voll: Yeah, that's true. So many places to fly with this that are [00:01:00] so high risk. Shaun Taylor: Check that out. Very cool. Speaker 3: Super fly over. Yeah no, that's awesome. Colby Curtola: Half pipe shot. Down one face up the other. Speaker 3: I know man. Epic. Zoe Stumbauch: We find this amazing canyon that has a river running through it. Trees all along it and ridges along the cliff face. So everything we need for an [00:01:30] awesome Star Wars pod race. Trey Player: We're here in Negro Canyon, just outside of Moab. And you can see the epic-ness of this place. Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:01:49] It's awesome. Trey Player: What we've done is we've set up a course. So what I need you to do is summon your innermost Star Wars character and attack this course like none other. Are you ready? Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:02:00] [00:02:00] Yeah. Trey Player: Alright, let's get it. Speaker 3: Woo, I'm excited! Colby Curtola: We're already messin' up. Trey challenged us to harness our inner Star Wars and ... This is where the pod racing begins. This is kind of where I was most excited about ... Was to get these things up in the air and see how they perform in a racing situation. Shaun Taylor: Basically he wanted us to channel our inner Star Wars and just go all out. And that's what we all did. Speaker 1: Zoe-FPV is Zewbacca 3D. S.F.P.V. is Colebi-Wan Kenobi. Nytfury is Fly-Low Ren. Shelby Voll [00:03:30] is Darth Vollder. (Upbeat techno music) Shelby Voll: We finally got to fly the pod racers in the environment we wanted them to. So we had this line where we'd go down the river and kind of, shoot back up and go [00:04:00] along the base of the cliff. Doing a simple oval to get used to how they'd fly ... All of us together. Shaun Taylor: And you're basically coming on another straight away and you have to split two huge boulders in a hair-pin u-turn. A right u-turn. Shelby Voll: That one I went down ... Half a lap in, 'cause I went too wide to go around the turn. And we were going slow, but my ass just backed up and they told me to break a bush. Whoa! It lost a little control ... It just spun [00:04:30] out of ... Zoe Stumbauch: I saw that. Shelby Voll: Uh yeah, the pod probably died. Totally just ... Speaker 3: Yeah we saw it... Shelby Voll: Squirreled out of control. No damage really. I just had to walk all the way around. 'Cause you can't cross the creek. Zoe Stumbauch: Shaun finds this epic line down through the river. He's basically like 5 inches above it. And then all above him is just cliff facings and trees. It was so magical to see. Shelby Voll: With [00:05:00] the crash I was in back of 3D. But only two were left in the air ... To go for some menacing. Speaker 3: The challenge was to dive down the face and then finish out the race down the creek. So Shaun goes up and loses complete [00:05:30] control once he flips over and his pod tumbles all the way down, 300-feet, to the bottom of the cliff. Zoe Stumbauch: Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God, did you guys see that? Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 4: Did it happen? Speaker 3: He tumbled man. Zoe Stumbauch: Yeah! [inaudible 00:05:55] Colby Curtola: So the Light Side won the pod race. I ended up beating Shaun. Shaun Taylor: [00:06:00] It basically came down as fast as it possibly could. Straight down in to the rocks and obliteration. Zoe Stumbauch: Down the side of a cliff into explosion of pieces where Kylo Ren blows up. And we spend several hours looking for the footage. It was such an awesome spectacle to see and behold. Colby Curtola: We had an idea of where he crashed. We knew it was at the base of the cliff. Shaun Taylor: We wanted to get this footage back. We [00:06:30] wanted to get this pod. We wanted to get the Go-Pro and so we hiked up there, you know, rattlesnakes and all. And we had to literally climb up through this cave between these rocks ... And this has already gotta be, I don't know, 300-feet high. We're way up there. We come out of the side and everybody's looking at us ... And blown away. I need that Go-Pro. Colby Curtola: All of sudden, 10 minutes later, you see them poppin' out of this little arch way, like 100 feet up on the cliff [00:07:00] face. Shaun Taylor: Dedication. Look at them. Wusses. Down there, just sittin' down. Speaker 3: We got this. Dark Side. Zoe Stumbauch: It was the most sketchy and scary thing I ever seen anyone do. We have footage of Shaun Taylor up on the side of a cliff and he's just dangling over as he's picking up quad pod off the side of a cliff. Shaun Taylor: I see no Go-Pro. Speaker 3: We got the proof. Zoe Stumbauch: And the funny thing is, the quad pod was [00:07:30] fine. Speaker 3: I do not see a Go-Pro. Look for a Go-Pro. Fan out. Zoe Stumbauch: You could fly afterwards. That guy got lucky. Colby Curtola: Enter the Dark Side. Shaun Taylor: Congratulations. Colby Curtola: It was a good race. Shaun Taylor: It was awesome man. Wait. On further review of ... Something magical ... We found that ... We found that in fact the Dark Side crossed the finish line first. Colby Curtola: [00:08:00] But my gear survived. So I have the footage to prove it. I didn't see um finish, so I don't know if anyone else did. Shaun Taylor: We got it on film. Colby Curtola: You got the camera? Shaun Taylor: Yes. Colby Curtola: Alright. Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:08:12] You got it on camera? Shaun Taylor: Yes. Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:08:15] Dude. [crosstalk 00:08:15] Destroyed. Zoe Stumbauch: I don't know how I feel about that. Speaker 3: Why'd you come up saying no? Colby Curtola: His rig is completely destroyed. Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:08:22] Awesome. Zoe Stumbauch: My boy Obi-Wan, he can actually fly his gear. Colby Curtola: The finish line was over the river. Over the river. Zoe Stumbauch: Yeah, well it was over the river. No, no [00:08:30] it was. Colby Curtola: The finish line was over the river. Zoe Stumbauch: The finish line was over the river. Shaun Taylor: No, the finish line ... This. The finish line, the original cross. Speaker 3: The river out and over the river. Colby Curtola: Which you didn't make it to. Speaker 3: Out over the river. Colby Curtola: Maybe a piece of foam rolled down there, but ... Shaun Taylor: I made it. Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:08:41] Colby Curtola: Might have got lucky with a piece of foam, but ... We call a tie? Shaun Taylor: Of course. Colby Curtola: Alright. Zoe Stumbauch: What do you mean a tie? Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:08:52] Actually, I'm totally good with it. I just wanted to see your reaction of you hearing me say that we found it. That's all I wanted to see. Colby Curtola: [00:09:00] So they didn't find any v-cams? Speaker 3: [crosstalk 00:09:02] No, no, no. Shaun Taylor: No, we climbed up that frickin' mountain to a cave. Shelby Voll: I mean they were like way ... Colby Curtola: Nice. Speaker 3: You got your camera though. Yeah? Shaun Taylor: Yes. Shelby Voll: We were on the way up man. Shaun Taylor: We got everything. Colby Curtola: Awesome. Shaun Taylor: We found it. We found the smashed Go-Pro and we found the memory card still inside of it. Fortunately it didn't catch that last scene, but it caught everything prior. So I would say that was a mission success. Colby Curtola: They ended up finding [00:09:30] it. They got the Go-Pros back, so everything was good. Speaker 1: Next episode, more action from the Canyons of Moab.