Monster Truck Coloring Page: Free Printable PDF Sheet

Monster Truck: History & Fun Facts

From Farm Trucks to Arena Giants

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.

Word of the car-crushing spectacle spread through word of mouth and grainy home-video footage traded between truck clubs, since there was no national circuit yet to organize the shows. Rival builders across the Midwest and South started welding their own oversized frames within a few years, racing to outdo Bigfoot's tire size and jump distance. By the mid-1980s a handful of promoters had turned the scattered exhibitions into a loose touring circuit that filled county fairgrounds and small stadiums on weekend nights.

Suspension, Tires, and Ground Clearance

A modern rally truck rides on tires that can stand five feet tall and weigh around 800 pounds each, a size originally borrowed from irrigation equipment used on Alaskan oil fields before builders realized how well the tread pattern handled loose dirt. Custom axles, often adapted from military trucks or heavy farm equipment, carry that weight while leaving enough ground clearance to drive straight over a parked car without the frame scraping the roof.

Long-travel suspension arms let each wheel move independently over ramps, junk piles, and wrecked cars without twisting the chassis, which is why the cab sits so high above the tires in profile. Builders mount the shocks nearly vertical and give them a foot or more of travel in each direction, a setup closer to what a dune buggy uses than anything found on a stock pickup. Engines are usually supercharged V8s making well over 1,500 horsepower, built to survive repeated hard landings rather than long highway runs.

Why Rally Crowds Love the Jump

Jump distance became the sport's signature spectacle once promoters realized how far a truck with that much ground clearance and torque could launch off a dirt ramp built inside a stadium. Competitions today score freestyle runs on air time, how cleanly the landing holds together, and whether a driver can clear a row of parked cars without the tires ever touching a roofline.

Arenas now host formal circuits with ranked drivers, sponsorship deals, and televised finals, a long way from the fairground exhibitions where the sport began. Chassis names get passed down and rebuilt across decades the way race cars rarely are, so a truck bearing a famous name today might share almost nothing mechanically with the original except the paint scheme and the reputation. That continuity, more than any single jump record, is what keeps longtime fans loyal to specific trucks rather than just the sport in general.