Inside Line

THE IRON SHEIK

Matt Taylor brought the world’s steepest portable 4WD demo, dubbed the Iron Summit 2.0, back to life. Here’s how…

“HONESTLY,” SAYS Iron Summit guru, reinventor and engineer Matt Taylor, “I hate it. I hate the Iron Summit with every fibre of my being.”

It’s not that Taylor doesn’t trust the six-metre high, 45-degree hydraulic mobile ramp that demonstrates the D-MAX and MU-X’s climbing and descending ability at shows around the country. He was a driver for the Iron Summit’s first iteration, under inventor builders Scott Anderson and Wayne Boatwright. “I‘ve probably got 10,000 runs over the Iron Summit under my belt,” he says. “But since I took delivery of it, I’ve only driven over it once. I don’t enjoy it.”

It’s just that, in his other life, Taylor is a professional stunt driver, having worked on films such as Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa and Maze Runner.

If he’s daunted, how would you react?

Where had the Iron Summit gone?

I bought it sight unseen from the property where it had been on the Hawkesbury River during the three-year break for COVID. I wasn’t sure how much flood damage it had sustained.

And?

Structurally, it was in really, really good nick. But we had to rebuild the electronic and hydraulic systems, and we really wanted to differentiate it from the original because previously only the MU-X ever went up and over the Iron Summit. We just never had enough ramps in the approach and the departure angle for the longer ute to clear. Now we do both cars and from both directions, which means we can double the amount of rides. Once 300 rides in a day was an all-time record; in Melbourne last year, we did 650.

What’s the slope?

It’s around a six-metre length at a true 45-degree incline, and then you’re about seven metres in the air. To put that into perspective, that’s a 100 per cent gradient: one metre forward is one metre up or down. As a comparison, the steepest road in Australia has a 20 per cent gradient.

And if you are on the steepest of the four-wheel drive tracks in the bush, you’re on around a 50 per cent gradient, which is about 30 degrees. So experienced off-roaders love it the most. Those purists have been on steep tracks and then they go on the Iron Summit and they genuinely appreciate the mechanics.

And are there any modifications to the D-MAX and MU-X you drive over?

Nothing—a stock standard MU-X or D-MAX will do it in a heartbeat. That’s the beauty of it: we designed a ramp that would challenge all of our competitors.

Also, these are our transport vehicles.

They don’t get a day off, they’re either driving up and down the world’s steepest ramp, or towing the 3.5-tonne Iron Summit to the next stop. Last year we did nearly 40,000km in each car.

We have a selection (right) of shots of passengers’ faces on their way down. Does everyone react differently?

The screamers are everybody’s favourite. We were at the Deni Ute Muster, near the main stage, and some incredible artists were playing really loudly out across the huge sound venue that Deni is. And we had four girls in the car and, at one point, screaming for dear life, they muffled out the Deni Ute Muster.

Why do you hate it?

We had a new driver audition last month, one of the guys from Movie World who I worked with on Mad Max, and I’ve got GoPro footage of him quite literally about to soil himself. When you have that mechanical and driving aptitude, you know how close to the edge this ride really is. There’s one or two degrees left in it—that’s it. The car goes up on that 45-degree ramp, but remember that it’s squatting over its rear axle as it rises. If you put an inclinometer on the sidestep, it goes to about 52 degrees because that’s how much the car is squatting. We are on the precipice of what physics will allow.