When it came time to film the stunt, the car’s driver, Jimmy Nickerson, still didn’t think it was ready. He told von Beltz it was fine, but it wasn’t – and it still didn’t have seat belts. Director Hal Needham had a mechanic work on the car for a while, and Bass then took it out for a test run.

When they tried to get it running on the morning of the stunt, another car had to push it to get it started, and then it couldn’t go faster than 8 mph. But the car, an Aston Martin, had no seatbelts, bald tires, defective steering and a malfunctioning clutch. All she’d have to do was ride as a passenger in the front seat of a car as it wove its way through a line of speeding oncoming cars. The stunt, Bass told her, was going to be a piece of cake. Von Beltz was a stunningly beautiful 24-year-old stuntwoman, actress and world-class skier in 1980 when she got the call from her fiancée, stunt coordinator Bobby Bass, to come to the desert outside of Las Vegas to double for Farrah Fawcett on the ensemble action comedy starring Burt Reynolds. She was 59 and had, with the aid of her sister, courageously battled quadriplegia for the last 35 years of her life.

Heidi von Beltz, a stuntwoman who was paralyzed when a stunt went terribly wrong on the set of The Cannonball Run, died Wednesday at Tarzana (Calif.) Medical Center.

Instaling Stunt Car Crash Test