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The New York Times
August 7, 1991, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
The Hot Rods of the 90's Go Crash! Crunch! Crush!
BYLINE: By BARRY MEIER
SECTION: Section C; Page 1; Column 4; Living Desk
LENGTH: 1451 words
DATELINE: WEST LEBANON, N.Y.
"PROTECT these wonderful drivers from danger." As the evening's invocation for the monster trucks faded away, 10,000 raucous fans at the Lebanon Valley Speedway here roared back to life.
Awash in spotlights were 10 men posed gladiator-style atop the six-foot wheels of giant pickup trucks with names like Bearfoot, the Carolina Crusher and UFO. The air smelled of burning oil and soon vibrated with revving engines.
So began another night of monster truck racing, a carnival-like mix of drag racing, demolition derby and stunt driving in which the stars look like overgrown pickups on steroids. The night's winner's purse of $2,700 is incidental; the real prizes are lucrative merchandising tie-ins for those whose vehicles become famous.
"There are a lot of people up there looking for blood and guts," said Dennis Anderson of Kill Devil Hills, N.C., the driver of Grave Digger, a black 1950 Chevolet panel truck decorated with green ghosts and tombstones. "They want to see one of us turn over and crash."
As if to prove his point, Mr. Anderson soon drove the 12,000-pound Grave Digger up a short ramp at 60 miles an hour and took to the air, trying to leap over a line of 10 junked cars. But as the vehicle descended, its giant tires hit the last wreck unevenly, sending it into a wild dance that flipped the truck over and sent it skidding on its roof. As Mr. An-derson emerged uninjured from a cloud of dust, his fans wildly chanted, "Digger! Digger! Digger!"
Monster trucks are the latest, and perhaps the weirdest, permutation in America's long romance with cars and thrills. An estimated 450,000 homes tune in to televised monster truck races weekly on the ESPN cable network; mil-lions of tiny monster trucks are parked in the pockets of children. There are live exhibitions every weekend around the country. A recent monster truck race at the Pontiac Silverdome outside of Detroit attracted more than 40,000 people.
Street versions of the giant pickup trucks are becoming so popular that many states have passed headlight and bumper height laws intended to prevent vehicles from becoming safety hazards. The problem: As a truck's body gets higher, so does its center of gravity, making it prone to tipping over.
"I like the paint jobs, the big suspensions and the power," said Lesley Parker, a 23-year-old truck driver from Lake-ville, Conn. who was at the speedway. Mr. Parker said he was turning his 1984 Ford pickup into a street version of a monster truck.
Some car enthusiasts scoff at the monster truck phenomenon as professional wrestling on wheels. But others see it tapping into the long suppressed American urge to tinker and customize vehicles.
Homemade hot rods were a symbol of the 1950's. Any teen-ager who didn't mind grease could take a wrench to an engine. But customizing cars today is extremely difficult for driveway mechanics. Their frames are now built in one piece so that any attempt to alter them can structurally weaken a vehicle. Engines also have computerized components and emission control devices that are expensive or illegal to modify.
"These days fooling around with your car in a garage to soup it up is virtually impossible," said Robert Casey, cu-rator of automotive history at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. "There is more opportunity to individualize trucks."
As a result, tinkerers have turned to pickups, doing everything from jacking-up their frames a foot or more to chrome-plating suspensions, bumpers and windshield wipers. Even big automakers are picking up on the trend by of-fering such options as oversized tires and roll bars on pickups and utility vehicles.
"I think everyone who has been in a traffic jam likes the idea of being able to roll over and crush all the cars ahead of them," said Robert Chandler, an auto-parts salesman from Hazelwood, Mo., who is generally credited with building the first monster truck in 1974. That jacked-up pickup with oversized tires was later named Bigfoot.
Monster trucks originated in the mud, evolving upwards from efforts by Mr. Chandler and others to customize pickups for off-road use.
Competitive trucks like Bigfoot now cost about $80,000 to build and feature four-wheel steering, a three-piece drive train and a souped-up engine with as much power as a stock racing car. The truck's balloon tires are the type used on fertilizer spreaders that must float through boggy fields, and their axles are taken from five-ton military vehicles.
In competitions like the one in West Lebanon, monster trucks drag-race each other round-robin style over a short dirt course embedded with junked cars. The giant trucks rev their engines to ear-screeching levels and, with a quick jerk, accelerate.
Slower, heavier trucks simply roll up dirt ramps onto and over the wrecks, crunching them down with the sound of a metal compactor. Faster trucks can take to the air with surprising grace, but they also crash down on the wrecks before bouncing along to the finish line. Each race takes about six seconds.
The principal supports for the drivers, who sit 10 feet off the ground, are huge springs under the truck's superstruc-ture and up to six shock absorbers on each wheel.
"How does it feel when you land?" Ray Piorkowski, a driver, asked rhetorically. "It's like being in an automobile accident."
According to the 49-year-old Mr. Chandler, the idea of building a monster truck began when he started selling off-road accessories for four-wheel drive vehicles. To advertise, Mr. Chandler began putting gear like oversized tires on his own truck.
That attracted the attention of a promoter who in 1982 offered to pay Mr. Chandler $500 to drive his truck over a wrecked car during a tractor-pulling competition.
"I don't understand why," said Mr. Chandler, a soft-spoken man, "but people like to hear the sound of metal crush-ing."
Understand it or not, that sound has been very good to Mr. Chandler. Today there are 11 versions of Bigfoot, 8 of which are active and may be performing on any given weekend in different shows and exhibitions across the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia. Mr. Chandler now hires his drivers and spends his time developing faster trucks for his company, Bigfoot 4-x-4.
The giant truck has also become a huge merchandising hit. There are die-cast Bigfoot model toys, a Bigfoot Nin-tendo game, Bigfoot roller skates, a Bigfoot radio, a Bigfoot go-cart and a battery-operated Bigfoot big enough for a child to ride in, as well as hats, T-shirts and other deals expected to bring in over $37 million in retail sales in 1991.
The Ford Motor Company has long sponsored Bigfoot, which uses a Ford pickup body. Earlier this year Mattel Inc. bought the toy marketing rights to Bigfoot, which also appears regularly in children's cartoons and commercials and has also been in six feature films, including "Take This Job and Shove It."
A few other monster truck owners have also tasted some success; Mr. Anderson, for example, owns three Grave Diggers. But most owners and drivers, who rely on small sponorships from auto parts producers, live a carnival-style existence, crisscrossing the country in trailers, performing 45 weekends a year and cooking their meals on portable grills on dusty racetrack infields.
Such problems matter little to fans, many of whom are young children who see the huge trucks as cartoon fantasies come to life. "They're awesome," said David Black, an 8-year-old from West Lebanon.
Some fans have also spent thousands of dollars customizing their own trucks, like Warren Mason, a 23-year-old factory worker from North Adams, Mass., who is partial toward Grave Digger. "If they allowed something like that on the road, everyone would get one," he said.
Motorists are starting to get a sense of what that might be like. Scaled-down monster trucks are increasingly ap-pearing on the nation's roadways. Last month, some 50,000 people attended a show in Bloomsberg, Pa., that featured 1,500 customized pickups, many of them street versions of professional monster trucks. As a result Missouri and several other states have been forced to pass so-called "Bigfoot" laws, which limit the height of such vehicles.
Some automotive enthusiasts are hoping that monster trucks will soon fade into obscurity. "The only comparison when I was younger was the demolition derby, and that was pretty dumb, too," said Larry Scheef of the American Truck Historial Society in Birmingham, Ala.
But many of the sport's fans insist that it is not a passing fad. "I'm so into this, I really can't get enough," said Mr. Parker, who wears a Bigfoot T-shirt. "And you know what? I've got an aunt and a grandmother who are really into it, too."
LOAD-DATE: August 7, 1991
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: Monster trucks are the latest phenomenon in America's long romance with cars and thrills. (David Jennings for The New York Times) (pg. C1); Robert Chandler, who is credited with building the first monster truck, Bigfoot, in 1974, is now developing faster trucks. (Bill Stover for The New York Times); In competitions, monster trucks race on a dirt course embedded with junked cars. (David Jennings for The New York Times) (pg. C10)
Copyright 1991 The New York Times Company
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