Roar of Monster Truck Engines Turns Machine Dreams Into Reality
I am at the intersection of Technology and Testosterone.
I am at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium for Saturday night’s United States Hot Rod Assn./Ford-Budweiser Truck Pull Championships and the USHRA/Camel Mud and Monster Truck Racing Championships.
The evening is equal parts internal combustion and male bonding. The air is moist and the sky is threatening but no one is carrying an umbrella. This is not an umbrella crowd.
I am wearing my Rancho Bernardo Inn golf visor. A guy shoots me one of those “you’re just the kind of weakling we didn’t need in our outfit” looks.
It is a large and excited crowd, upward of 25,000, 90% male, full of guys who make things, fix things, clean things, deliver things and sell things for a living. You will not see this crowd when the Davis Cup team comes to La Costa.
The noise from the unmuffled engines is homicidal. Even at 100 yards your sinuses ache when one of these 500-horsepower babies goes full throttle.
The crowd loves the roar; it is a crowd of devotees.
“I got 25 120-minute videotapes at home with all these guys and their machines,” explained Darrell Williams, 27, a television repairman from San Marcos. “Each engine has its own sound.”
When Clark Redusky of Poway is introduced in his Terminator, the cheer from the crowd is long and lusty. If Jim McMahon had done anything to merit such a cheer, San Diego would be a happier place today.
It is a crowd of patriots. “That’s how we won the war in the Pacific,” screams the announcer as a tractor contraption called the Orange Blossom Special II tromps over eight car carcasses.
It is a crowd of American dreamers: dreaming of machines they’ve owned and machines they want to own.
“My goal is to build my own Monster Truck,” said David Weaver, 22, of Oceanside, a heavy equipment mechanic.
“I’m working on a ’47 Willys one-ton to make it street legal,” said David Powers, 37, of La Mesa, a civilian employee at North Island.
“I’ve loved this stuff since I was 19 and racing up and down First Avenue in El Cajon in my Camaro,” said Tom Warnock, 35, of El Cajon, an inspector at a machine shop that makes airplane parts.
The brightly colored trucks and dragsters and dune buggies carry in-your-face names such as Exterminator, Psychotic Reaction, Illegal Speed, Rat Patrol and Prosecutor. It is a night of power thrusting, competition and a chance to see someone get his head caved in if his roll bar fails.
I ask Wayne Jessup, 41, a roofer from Lemon Grove, why there are not more women in attendance. He is wearing a T-shirt with an unkind reference to his ex-wife.
“Women just don’t seem to care about engines,” he said, adding in sorrow. “I don’t know why more women can’t be like Shirley Muldowney.”
Silberman Case Attracts a Crowd
* How hot a story is the Richard Silberman money-laundering case?
When thousands of pages of documents--FBI wiretap affidavits, phone transcripts, etc.--became public last week at the federal courthouse, the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune each sent a reporter.
Then the Tribune called for a backup. The Union responded. And back and forth and back and forth.
Soon there were 10 reporters and two portable copying machines busily at work.
