Every redneck’s favourite spectacle, the car-crushing monster truck derives from one vehicle.
You’ve probably seen those enormous ‘Monster Trucks’ on TV. It seems that the car-crushing leviathans have been around forever.
In the Middle East, such trucks are unusual, though the Emirates Motor Museum in Abu Dhabi has a selection of customised Dodge Power Wagons which come in a variety of flavours ranging from modified Dune-bashing specials to an outrageous Dodge-shaped caravan, with wheels from a machine designed for moving parts for oil rigs.
However, while we have the aforementioned dune-bashing as a sport, Monster Truck racing hasn’t taken off here like it has in the ‘states. Over there, ‘competitions’ are run week in, week out with ever more powerful machines racing around oval tracks, usually with a number of scrap cars and other obstacles to drive over.
In actual fact, these shows are more ‘sports entertainment’ akin to WWE wrestling rather than real competitions, with ever-changing ‘rules’ to create spectacle, as well as very often pre-decided winners and results.
While people have been souping-up trucks for as long as they have been around, the absurd Monster Truck, with hugely oversized wheels and comedy suspension can be traced back to just one machine, built in the late 1970s known as Bigfoot.
A construction worker in Missouri named Bob Chandler started to modify his own F250 Ford for serious off-road use.
His enthusiasm for the subject got to the point where he decided to open his own workshop selling parts for modified four wheel drive vehicles, and as such his own vehicle was modified to monstrous proportions to act as a sort of rolling billboard for the business.
Firstly, the stock Ford chassis was strengthened. Next, super wide axles from an ex-army vehicle were bolted on, along with modifications to the final drive and the transfer box, in order that it didn’t just go bang every time it was put in to gear.
Perhaps the most defining character of the truck though, was the massive 66” wheels that had been sourced from a crop dusting machine, giving the truck the ability to literally drive over junk cars – as Chandler demonstrated to great acclaim on a couple of wrecks bound for the scrapyard.
On a technical note, Bigfoot still remained reasonably agile, as Chandler had developed a type of hydraulic four wheel steering from a sketch he had seen somewhere. This had never been done before as far as anybody knew, and gave Bigfoot a degree of maneuverability that the big spindly wheels belied.
Over the next few years the truck captured the public’s imagination, and Chandler was constantly being invited to perform at agricultural shows.
By the 1980s, Bigfoot, in many successive guises spawned hundreds of imitators, and picked up dozens of franchises including remote control cars and even a Japanese cartoon series spin-off.
The truck’s latest incarnation and the shop it was created in remain popular to this day.
Backtrack
The car-crushing monster truck derives from one vehicle
Every redneck’s favourite spectacle, the car-crushing monster truck derives from one vehicle.
You’ve probably seen those enormous ‘Monster Trucks’ on TV. It seems that the car-crushing leviathans have been around forever.
In the Middle East, such trucks are unusual, though the Emirates Motor Museum in Abu Dhabi has a selection of customised Dodge Power Wagons which come in a variety of flavours ranging from modified Dune-bashing specials to an outrageous Dodge-shaped caravan, with wheels from a machine designed for moving parts for oil rigs.
However, while we have the aforementioned dune-bashing as a sport, Monster Truck racing hasn’t taken off here like it has in the ‘states. Over there, ‘competitions’ are run week in, week out with ever more powerful machines racing around oval tracks, usually with a number of scrap cars and other obstacles to drive over.
In actual fact, these shows are more ‘sports entertainment’ akin to WWE wrestling rather than real competitions, with ever-changing ‘rules’ to create spectacle, as well as very often pre-decided winners and results.
While people have been souping-up trucks for as long as they have been around, the absurd Monster Truck, with hugely oversized wheels and comedy suspension can be traced back to just one machine, built in the late 1970s known as Bigfoot.
A construction worker in Missouri named Bob Chandler started to modify his own F250 Ford for serious off-road use.
His enthusiasm for the subject got to the point where he decided to open his own workshop selling parts for modified four wheel drive vehicles, and as such his own vehicle was modified to monstrous proportions to act as a sort of rolling billboard for the business.
Firstly, the stock Ford chassis was strengthened. Next, super wide axles from an ex-army vehicle were bolted on, along with modifications to the final drive and the transfer box, in order that it didn’t just go bang every time it was put in to gear.
Perhaps the most defining character of the truck though, was the massive 66” wheels that had been sourced from a crop dusting machine, giving the truck the ability to literally drive over junk cars – as Chandler demonstrated to great acclaim on a couple of wrecks bound for the scrapyard.
On a technical note, Bigfoot still remained reasonably agile, as Chandler had developed a type of hydraulic four wheel steering from a sketch he had seen somewhere. This had never been done before as far as anybody knew, and gave Bigfoot a degree of maneuverability that the big spindly wheels belied.
Over the next few years the truck captured the public’s imagination, and Chandler was constantly being invited to perform at agricultural shows.
By the 1980s, Bigfoot, in many successive guises spawned hundreds of imitators, and picked up dozens of franchises including remote control cars and even a Japanese cartoon series spin-off.
The truck’s latest incarnation and the shop it was created in remain popular to this day.