Printable Monster Truck and Off-Road Coloring Pages

Bolting oversized farm and construction tires onto pickup frames started as a backyard hobby among Midwest truck owners in the mid-1970s, long before anyone called it a sport. "Bigfoot," built in 1975 from a Ford F-250 by Bob Chandler, is widely credited as the truck that turned car-crushing exhibitions into a stand-alone attraction after crowds at a Missouri farm show watched it flatten a row of junked sedans. Chandler kept upgrading the truck through the early 1980s, adding bigger axles and taller tires until Bigfoot became a touring act in its own right, appearing at fairgrounds from Missouri to California.

The dune buggy as most people picture it today began with a boat builder named Bruce Meyers, who in 1964 mounted a lightweight fiberglass body onto a shortened Volkswagen Beetle floorpan and called it the Meyers Manx. The Beetle's rear-mounted, air-cooled engine and simple mechanicals made it an easy donor car, and Meyers's stripped-down fiberglass shell turned a everyday commuter chassis into a machine built purely for fun on loose ground.

Dune buggies quickly moved from beach cruising to serious desert racing. In 1967 organizers ran the first Mexican 1000 rally down the Baja California peninsula, an event that grew into today's famous Baja 1000, and early Manx-style buggies were among the first vehicles to tackle that brutal off-road course.

The modern quad bike traces back to the Honda US90, released in 1970 as a three-wheeled All-Terrain Cycle riding on oversized, low-pressure balloon tires. Those three-wheelers, often called ATCs, became hugely popular through the 1970s and early 1980s for their light weight and simple, motorcycle-style controls, long before the four-wheeled layout most people picture today ever existed.

Suzuki changed the shape of the industry in 1983 with the QuadRunner LT125, the first mass-produced four-wheeled ATV. Adding a fourth wheel made the machine dramatically more stable in turns and on side slopes than the tippy three-wheelers of the era, and other manufacturers quickly followed with their own four-wheel models.

Side-by-side UTVs grew out of simple farm utility carts that ranchers used in the 1980s to haul feed, tools, and fencing supplies across rough pasture ground. Those early machines were slow, boxy, and built purely for work. Polaris introduced the Ranger in 1998, widely credited as one of the first true side-by-side utility vehicles designed around two seats, a real cargo bed, and enough ground clearance to handle trails a pickup truck could never reach.

A tube-steel roll cage, technically called a rollover protective structure, is the single feature that separates a UTV from nearly every other off-road machine. Riders sit inside that cage in real bucket seats with seat belts, doors or safety nets close off the open sides, and a proper windshield frame sits ahead of the driver.

Demolition derby began in 1958 on Long Island, New York, when a promoter named Larry Mendelsohn noticed that crowds at the local fairgrounds paid more attention to cars crashing on their way to a race than to the actual race itself. He built an event around that idea alone: a muddy oval field, a pack of worn-out cars, and one simple rule, keep driving until every other car in the field is stalled out or too smashed to move.

Older full-size American sedans and station wagons, like the one on this page, became the traditional derby car of choice because their heavy steel frames and long front and rear ends absorb hits better than smaller or newer unibody cars.

Go-kart racing traces back to a Southern California garage in 1956, where a hot-rod builder named Art Ingels welded together a tiny four-wheeled frame, bolted on a surplus two-stroke lawnmower engine, and drove it around a parking lot for fun between races. That first rough-running machine had no bodywork, no suspension, and barely enough power to outrun a bicycle, but the idea spread fast among fellow racers who wanted a cheap, small-scale way to go wheel-to-wheel without the cost of a full stock car. Ingels is still remembered informally as the father of karting for that one afternoon of tinkering.