Monster trucks don’t have doors. To get up to the cockpit, you climb up through the truck’s steel frame tubes, like a roughneck scaling an oilrig.
It isn’t easy – you twist, you curse and finally you arrive at the driver’s seat, a bare metal shell surrounded by pipes, gauges and an ominous-looking lever that resembles a dynamite plunger from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
This will not be a typical drive: The cockpit is 2 ½ meters in the air, and there are clear panels in the floor that let you see where you’re going when the truck rears up on its hind wheels in a giant wheelie – a manoeuvre that happens a lot, thanks to the 1,500-horsepower engine. The gas pedal has a hook that goes over your toes, so you can pull it back if the throttle jams – if not, the truck has enough power to launch itself four stories into the air.
Just in case, there’s a Hail Mary backup – an assistant will stand by the track with a remote kill switch that can shut off the truck if you’re knocked unconscious. But if that doesn’t work, all bets are off.
These were some of the lessons I absorbed as I prepared to drive the Black Stallion, a champion monster truck with a lurid paint job and a price tag somewhere north of $250,000.
“Don’t crash,” warned Mike Vaters, Black Stallion’s builder and driver. “I don’t have a spare truck.”
When I decided to test drive a monster truck, I had no idea how hard it would be. I spent months calling teams like Gravedigger and Bigfoot, but none of them were interested in letting an amateur pilot their costly, high-powered show truck.
Then came Vaters, a Maryland-based monster truck competitor, and a good sport. We were on – if I showed up at the Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on the appointed day with a fireproof suit and a racing helmet, I could drive the Black Stallion.
Now the time had arrived, and I was a little spooked. Olympic Stadium looked a scene from The Terminator: wrecked cars and decommissioned school buses were being heaped into huge metal piles, and hundreds of tons of special dirt had been trucked in. Earth-moving machines were sculpting all this into ramps that could launch a monster truck higher than the stadium’s first section of stands.
I have driven everything from Formula cars to an NHL Zamboni, but the Black Stallion was intimidating. Up close, it exuded sheer mechanical menace, looming over me like an otherworldly juggernaut. The wheels came up to my chin, and there were eight shock absorbers, each the size and shape of a bazooka.
I climbed up into the cockpit and trussed myself into the six-part seatbelt system, which was equipped with ratcheting devices that tightened the belts down so hard that I could barely breathe. This was essential: If I got the Stallion high in the air and came down wrong, immobilization would be the key to survival. “You know that little paddle and ball toy?” Vaters asked. “You don’t want to be the ball.”
Earlier that day, I watched Vaters and his fellow competitors make some practice runs. The trucks laid down walls of terrifying sound, and flew off the jumps like battle tanks running a mogul course.
Vaters explained the physics of a monster truck jump. Ideally, you land at a shallow angle, with plenty of forward motion, like an Olympic ski jumper gently touching down on the outrun slope. But sometimes the trajectory goes bad – you get launched straight up, stop, then plunge back down from the height of a four-storey building.
