Action sports wild man Travis Pastrana is ready for takeoff.

It’s landing in one piece — and not splashing down — that’s going to be the tricky part.

Pastrana wrapped up practice this week for his stunt on New Year’s Eve, when he’ll attempt to set a world record for the longest jump in a rally car, from the Pine Street Pier in Long Beach, Calif., onto a barge anchored in the harbor.

The current record is 171 feet set by Pastrana’s Subaru teammate, Ken Block, in a rally car in November 2006. Pastrana wants to break that mark by more than 100 feet. To do so, he’ll have to clear at least 230 feet of water between the pier and barge.

“There’s still a lot to learn, but you don’t want to take all the fun out of the jump,” Pastrana said in a phone interview. “So we’ll be learning a little bit on jump day.

“I really think we can put on a great show either way. I’m really hoping to make it look easy, but I think there’s a lot of people hoping I don’t,” he added with a laugh. “Either way, it’s kind of a win-win. I hate to look at it like that. I’m really hoping for the perfect landing. We’ll see.”

Pastrana said he made several test jumps at a site east of Temecula in Riverside County, including four at approximately the distance he’ll be attempting to jump. While he had some hard landings and one end-over-end wipeout, Pastrana is confident he can complete the jump without ending up in the water.

Pastrana, remember, is the guy who announced himself to the action sports world when at age 15 he celebrated an X Games gold medal by jumping his motorcycle into San Francisco Bay in 1999. That stunt got him into a fair bit of trouble, and he lost his prize money and medal.

He’d prefer to stay out of the water this time.

The distance changed a little bit from jump to jump in practice, but Pastrana anticipates the front of the barge will be about 230 feet from the pier. “So obviously under 230 I hit the water, over 300 and I land flat and probably and break my back,” he said. “So somewhere in that range will probably be OK.”

The hardest part of practice was dealing with headwinds, which reduce the distance the car will fly, and crosswinds, which make aiming for the landing ramp difficult.

He said a 5 mph headwind makes the car go 40 feet less over 200 feet.

“That’s significant,” he said. “Hopefully it’s not windy. But if it is windy, it’ll be a Hail Mary. Unless it’s a hurricane or something, I’m going to try to fly the car.”

He started with two cars and is down to one after wiping out on one jump.

“As it turns out, it’s very difficult to jump a car,” said Pastrana, who’s usually flying through the air on a motorcycle. “If it goes well, it goes really well. If it goes bad, it goes really bad.”

The good news, he said, was even after the wipeout and some hard landings, he was still on line to land on the barge and not in the water.

Pastrana said he’s gone through a safety course, and will have scuba gear in his car.

“As long as I’m not knocked out I think I’ll be all right,” he said.

Pastrana realizes a lot of people think he’s crazy. But everything has been well-calculated, from the construction of the ramps to mathematicians figuring out angles and weight.

“It’s not perfect, but it gets you close,” he said. “Then it’s just fine-tuning, to figure out how a car really does fly.”

He found that the rear spoiler he uses in rally racing caused the back of the car to drop in the air, so that had to be changed.

“I actually found that I can hit the brakes in the air and bring the front end down or keep on the gas and bring the front end up. I can really control the car through the air, which is nice,” he said.

The jump will be the latest in Red Bull’s New Year, No Limits series.

Just as Australian freestyle motocross star Robbie Maddison pulled off death-defying jumps in Las Vegas on the last two New Year’s Eves, Pastrana said he’s confident he can do this.

“I get asked, ‘Do you really want to go this far? The world record is 171 feet. Why do you want to go 250?’ I want to push it. I want to be the best that I can. I don’t want to just do something a little better. If we can do it a lot better, let’s do it. Let’s push the limits.”