Big Wheels Hellbent for Glory

“Coming this summer . . . Mr. Destruction himself . . . the legendary metal-mashing monster truck . . . never-before-seen crashes, and all the crazy Dennis Anderson stuff that he doesn’t even know we’re showing . . . all in one action-packed video.”

--Public address announcement,

Charlotte Motor Speedway

*

Mr. Destruction has eyes that fix on you like blue lasers and a mane of golden hair jutting out the back of his baseball cap. He wears black boots and black pants with ghoulish green flames licking up from the hem, and, clutching a crash helmet, he climbs seven feet off the ground to reach the driver’s seat of his world-famous racing truck, Grave Digger.

The supercharged, methanol-burning behemoth packs 1,400 horsepower, and when the engine revs up it blasts out a noise like someone jackhammering in an echo chamber. The tires are 5 1/2 feet tall; each one weighs 700 pounds. The fiberglass body--fashioned after a 1950 Chevy panel truck--towers almost 11 feet off the ground, teetering precariously atop a lime-green tubular chassis and 6-foot-tall, nitrogen-gas shocks that cost $1,000 apiece.

No one knows what will happen when Dennis Anderson floors the pedal of his $125,000 machine. Spraying out a fearsome plume of dirt, booming from zero to 60 in under five seconds, he may fly up the dirt ramp, up over a row of junk cars, and sail 100 feet through the air in a spectacular charge to victory . . . or he may lose it, his tires bouncing, the truck careening and flipping over, maybe the hull shattering like an eggshell, a wheel breaking off and rolling away.

Anderson’s hellbent style has made Grave Digger the most popular of all the monster trucks. Its stature has been eclipsed only by one rival, the first and greatest of the monsters, Bigfoot.

Now they are coming together again, Grave Digger versus Bigfoot, the two titans in a P.T. Barnum world of burning oil and socket wrenches and neon-colored rigs as grotesque as bobble-head caricatures. Whenever the two machines race, as they have hundreds of times over more than a decade, their sun-scorched, T-shirt-wearing fans get to savor one of the classic matchups, a duel no less enthralling than any long and hard-fought rivalry: the Cowboys and 49ers, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey.

This time the confrontation is taking place on a muggy summer weekend at the Charlotte Motor Speedway under brooding dark clouds that seem to radiate their own heat. There is a good chance that neither truck will win; the field--billed as the biggest ever in monster truck racing--includes 27 competitors from all over the country.

Ten of the fastest will race on a 400-foot, U-shaped track obstructed by high dirt moguls and rows of junk cars, where any mistake or mechanical breakdown could result in defeat.

Bigfoot is the reigning king, a truck that has won more races and championships than any other. It is computer-designed, custom-machined, assembled, tested, painted and baked at a vast garage in Hazelwood, Mo., with the help of more than 40 employees. Like all icons, Bigfoot stands for deeper values: durability, consistency, the strong Midwestern ethic of substance over flash.

Grave Digger is the counterculture machine, pieced together by a crew of less than a dozen in its own cavernous garage in Kill Devil Hills, N.C. It is not about dependability; it is a no-fear symbol of rebellion and risk, a Gen-X masher, flashy and fallible.

The polar opposite images are not by some marketing design. The two trucks perfectly represent the men behind them, each a legend in their narrow sphere.

Bigfoot’s Bob Chandler, 55, created the monster truck in 1974, and even though he doesn’t race his inventions, he has dominated the field ever since. A meticulous tinkerer with a balding pate and a white-frosted red beard, he is as stern as a preacher. He doesn’t drink or smoke and admits he feels uncomfortable even sitting in a barroom--or on a couch watching TV, for that matter.

“I feel like I’m cheating somebody,” he says of the squandered time. Chandler’s way of indulging himself is to relax with classical music, or escort his wife, Marilyn, to the theater; they have seen “Phantom of the Opera” in London, New York and St. Louis. Chandler is known to arrive at the office before sunrise, and tote a laptop home at night in his obsessive search for ever-newer, faster monster designs.

“It just intrigues the heck out of me what you can do with a computer,” he says.

Grave Digger’s Anderson, 37, is the kid who never grew up: freewheeling, affable and loud-talking. He chain-smokes. He clamors for the limelight like a rock star. He has no use for computers: “I know when my stuff’s broke,” he says in his down-home drawl, “ ‘cause it’s sitting in a pile in my shop.”

When he isn’t crushing the accelerator in one of his mad dashes to the finish line, Anderson likes to listen to country singer Alan Jackson, go fishing, or climb into a skiff with a short-barrel shotgun and hunt for water moccasins in the brackish tidelands of the Carolina coast. If you’re in there with him, he just might bring a snake back alive.

“He’s the wild and crazy guy,” says Chandler, who is no fan of his rival’s racing style. “He scares me, as far as safety.”

Back in 1985, when Anderson was just another unknown in a fledgling freak sport promoted alongside tractor pulls and mud races, he mounted a new $3,800 chrome supercharger onto his Grave Digger engine and hauled the truck up to St. Paul, Minn., where he nipped Bigfoot in a disputed finish.

“About 2 or 3 in the morning, the telephone rang,” his father, Jesse, remembers. “He said, ‘Daddy, I did it, I did it, I did it! I beat Bigfoot!’ He showed me that film about 15 times.”

Since then, various Grave Diggers have run against Bigfoots perhaps 300 or 400 times over the years. Anderson concedes a slight edge to Bigfoot: “They’ve got the best monster truck technology out there, but it’s not unbeatable. I’m a regular old scratch pad and lead pencil type, but I’ve got a lot of seat time [racing]. I’ve got more seat time than Bob Chandler does.”

Anderson is careful talking about Bigfoot, loath to appear the villain. But when asked if the rivalry is friendly, he first balks, and then some inner fire ignites, a methanol flame deep inside him. He lifts his eyes toward the Charlotte track with a look of pure blue heat.

“When it comes to out there, it’s not really friendly, because I’ll kick his ass just as hard as I can kick it. If I can beat him by 300 feet, I’m going to beat him by 300 feet. It’s blood out there.”

*

Monster trucks race two at a time, like dragsters, usually in straight 200-foot dashes, leaping junk cars as they go. Sometimes there are U-turn tracks, or circular tracks, where they start and finish on opposite sides. But rarely are tracks quite as long as this one: each lane a 400-foot obstacle course with three high moguls on the first straightaway, a U-turn around a tall yellow pylon, and three sets of car jumps on the back side--first two cars, then two more, then a row of eight junkers just before the finish line.

Under any circumstances the track would be challenging, but intermittent rains have left the turf and red clay sodden and slick.

The monster trucks cluster in a broad asphalt pit area, arriving in semitrailers. Two long rigs deliver a pair of Bigfoot trucks that will race here: the traditional blue Ford and a flashier number known as Snake Bite, a reptilian green eye-catcher with white, tubular steel “fangs” jutting off the front.

Dreamed up as the team’s own “bad guy” challenger for Bigfoot, the gaudy Snake Bite design grates against Chandler’s sensibilities; years ago, he and Scott Johnston, his marketing wizard, clashed over a less outlandish contraption known as Wildfoot, which no longer exists. “The essence of the discussion,” Johnston recalls wryly, “was his love of tastefully understated giant flying trucks.”

Anderson has no such passion for subtlety. His Grave Digger emerges from a black trailer with blood-red headlights and green flames splashed across the hood, its purplish side panels etched with eyeless ghouls, haunted houses and graveyards misted with ghostly green swirls. Bigfoot’s name appears on one of the headstones.

Unveiled in January, this is the 12th Grave Digger, a new design incorporating the same exterior motif but a longer wheelbase, for improved stability, and a driver’s seat that is now centered, like those in other trucks, for better balance and sight lines.

Qualifying runs are scheduled for noon--individual time trials that will set the pairings for the evening’s race program and give the drivers a one-time chance to try out the track. Even before the runs start, however, mechanics are moving under the elaborate chassis, like children on jungle gyms, to make adjustments. The long course and damp conditions call for transmissions that will deliver more thrust at top speeds and less at the starting line, where wheels are likely to spin.

Swapping in a new gearbox takes less than an hour. Engine adjustments are also being made, the timing and fuel mix set to run “fat”--richer with methanol, to further moderate the start.

Drivers are called together for a safety meeting--among other things, they are urged not to tear up the costly turf--and then the monsters begin moving around, like so many gigantic insects. A few at a time roll out a gate and down a long runway to the track’s staging area, their engines crackling like strings of fireworks. Trackside officials begin jamming in earplugs.

Bigfoot’s racing team has seven members, but Chandler is not one of them. He no longer attends every event and has stayed behind in St. Louis, orchestrating the operation from afar. His two drivers are bandy, bleach-blond Dan Runte and tall, woolly haired Eric Meagher.

Runte, driving cautiously on the wet track, qualifies only sixth in 19.48 seconds. Meagher in Snake Bite is fourth, 19.19. Grave Digger opens more auspiciously, qualifying in 17.77 seconds, the day’s fastest time.

Afterward, Anderson relaxes with his crew and family: his girlfriend, Lisa Comstock, their month-old baby, Krysten, and his two young sons from a former marriage. He watches the boys, Adam and Ryan, tool around the lot in twin, six-foot Grave Digger go-carts, and retreats from the sweltering humidity by slipping into the cab of his big rig, cranking up the air conditioner.

A rumpled bed is wedged behind the seats. For weeks at a time, this is his home. Like most other monster drivers, he lives a nomadic life, racking up 60,000 to 85,000 miles traveling to about 45 weekend races and exhibitions a year, all over the continent. His zig-zagging odyssey takes him to the Silverdome, the Superdome, the Kingdome, the L.A. Coliseum in January, Anaheim Stadium, hockey arenas, county fairs--just about anywhere. “We hit probably every big dome in the United States,” Anderson says. “I’ll make two rounds from East Coast to West Coast in January and February.” The schedule is grueling, but he shrugs it off. Truck drivers call him on the CB.

“You can sit in this thing for 10 hours, and if you don’t want to talk to nobody, you just turn that right off”--he indicates the radio--”and just ride, ride, ride. And you can think about whatever--and usually I’m thinking about that truck, or some kind of way to make money to keep my operation going.”

Monster drivers typically make $60,000 or $70,000 a year. Anderson brings home $85,000 or $90,000. Although he does not have a major sponsor, such as Ford, which bankrolls Bigfoot, he does get appearance fees, prize purses, fan club memberships and a royalty on videos and T-shirts, his biggest moneymakers. Like Bigfoot, Grave Digger has a souvenir store--Digger’s Dungeon--and Anderson gets a percentage off the newly marketed $2,750 go-carts. Sponsors supply him with camshafts and lug bolts.

“My best year in monster trucking I turned $1.2 million,” he says, “and at the end of the year my butt was broke. I brought in that much, but I spent that much.”

He is notoriously hard on the trucks--and on himself. Collisions with concrete walls have broken three of his ribs and shattered a kneecap. One night in Providence, R.I., Grave Digger landed on its nose, the wheels spinning so hard they kicked the nose straight back up in the air, the truck suddenly bolt-up on its back tires, the back tires then vaulting it into a harrowing somersault that ended with Anderson’s roof thwacking against a concrete facade only a few feet from a row of spectators.

The truck was nearly totaled, but no one was hurt, and PACE Motor Sports, the promoter of the Charlotte race, was able to package the film in a rousing video about Grave Digger’s exploits.

“Made a few people spill their popcorn,” Anderson remembers with half a smile. He is hard-edged in the way of so many men raised in the sticky garages of the South, in a culture feverish with the love of motor sports. Anderson and his brother, Lester, started out racing motor scooters from the time they needed a step stool to reach the seats.

Many years later, their dad, a pipe fitter, arranged chicken races--two beat-up cars racing toward one another, each driver waiting for the other to bail out--on a rural lot in Virginia. Dennis went on into mud-bog racing, where his brash boast--”I’ll take this old junk and dig you a grave”--became the seed of his monster truck persona.

While Anderson talks, a woman raps on the window of the big rig. She is about 40, a curly haired blond who introduces herself as a Charlotte police officer. “If you don’t give me an autographed picture, I’m going to take you to jail,” she says.

Anderson laughs and scurries behind the seat to find a poster.

“I just want one for my son,” she says. “He loves Bigfoot and Grave Digger and all that stuff--and he’s 11 years old.”

Anderson takes the time to personalize the signature--”To Matt”--and they flirt for a while. She finally rolls up the poster and says, “You really are an attractive man.”

“You’re an attractive policewoman, too,” he says. “I’d like you to pull me over sometime.”

“And really arrest you.”

“Hell, yeah.”

She leaves laughing. He grins and talks about celebrity, how he’d be nothing, flat broke, without the support of his fans.

“When I’m cruising down the road, I’ll sneak in a truck stop, man, and a lot of times, if there’s a family in there, there’ll be some kid that’s just a monster truck fiend. And I’ll see him over there kind of pointing. . . .”

Gone are the days when Anderson would flash a big smile or wave. “Sometimes it’s pretty cool, but I’ve done it long enough now that I don’t go, ‘Yeah, hey, come on over,’ ‘cause they’ll sit right there and you can’t even slurp your soup.”

*

Inky clouds cast a blue evening light over the asphalt and hay bales and grandstands of the speedway. With the feature program about to begin, the monsters rumble through the dusk. Of the 10 competitors, eight will make it through the first round--five winners and the three fastest losers. After that each winner will advance and each loser will be eliminated.

The qualifying times set up a Bigfoot and Grave Digger confrontation in the first bracket. A reverberating public address announcement introduces the trucks, and they move from the staging area to the course: Bigfoot nearest the grandstand, where a few thousand fans have paid the $12 admission charge to scatter across the open bleachers, and Grave Digger on the infield side, where a tall metal tower supports an ESPN camera that will beam the action nationwide.

The drivers wear helmets, foam neck protectors, and fire-retardant suits. Strapped into single bucket seats, they check an assortment of gauges: dials showing oil pressure, temperature, fuel levels, battery charge and so on. A rocker switch allows them to turn the rear wheels; the trucks all have four-wheel steering. A kill button will shut down everything at once in an emergency.

The tree lights flash green and the trucks leap forward, screaming and spraying rooster tails of dirt. Bigfoot gets better traction off the line and vaults the moguls, arriving first at the turn. Grave Digger fishtails, taking the turn wide, and is a truck length behind at the first car jump.

Bigfoot clears it smoothly; Digger hits at an angle. Still trailing as he lands, Anderson overcorrects his steering and manages to accelerate with a startling burst, closing the gap. He draws even with Bigfoot as they both fly into the third ramp.

The two trucks soar at once--Bigfoot low, straight, Grave Digger higher, rocking sideways. Flashbulbs fill the grandstand, a bright scattering of sparks.

*

Protected by heavy roll cages, the drivers seldom suffer more than severe bruises, but the ride can be rough. At its worst, it’s a little like flying a helicopter through a tornado. Once, in one of his many studies of race dynamics, Chandler mounted a camera inside the Bigfoot cockpit.

Only when the driver saw the tape did he realize that at certain instances his head was almost totally below the steering wheel.

Transparent floorboards allow the drivers to see the ground and the crushed cars below, helping them to anticipate the ever-changing bumps and dips. But the trucks are unwieldy, easily thrown off balance. A driver who hits the brakes while soaring 15 feet in the air can give himself an unforgettable lesson in Newtonian physics--a crash course, since the torque generated when 2,800 pounds of wheels stop spinning is enough to throw the truck into a nose dive.

The monsters are like bumblebees, an engineering nightmare. On any normal vehicle, it is possible to control the chaotic forces of bounce and sway: You manage it with springs and shocks. On a monster, more than half the weight rests in the tires, wheels and axles, unsupported by the suspension system. That “unsprung weight,” as drivers call it, reacts wildly to the track. A tire landing hard will collapse and spring back, shooting the entire body upward.

Chandler spends much of his time puzzling over ways to dampen up-and-down forces, to harness torque. By backpedaling--laying off the accelerator only slightly during a jump--a driver can lower the nose enough to land horizontal, accelerating again while the tires are pressed hard to the track. One of Chandler’s latest projects is a shoebox-size computer module stowed behind the Bigfoot seat to analyze the five-ton truck in action.

“It gives us something like 60 readings per second of 16 different items--oil pressure, fuel pressure, cylinder temperature, exhaust temperature, the shift points--where the truck is shifting as it’s going down track. The rpm of the drive shaft, the rpm of the engine, so we can figure what the transmission and torque converter are doing, whether it’s slipping too much.”

Chandler’s software allows him to chart a run down to the microsecond. His technological superiority has drawn resentment; he is not especially popular among some of his rivals, who see him as a Dr. Frankenstein.

Like his father and all four of his brothers, Chandler started out as a construction worker. He had no engineering instruction and only a smattering of college when he opened a small four-wheel-drive shop. His first monster truck, in 1974, was a promotional ploy: a Ford F-250 pickup with 48-inch tires that Chandler displayed at auto shows. On a lark, he drove the thing over a wrecked car, impressing a promoter who saw the videotape.

Before long, Chandler and a few other pioneers were driving seven-ton trucks over junker cars in large arenas. Exhibition car crushing gave way to racing in the mid-1980s. Although Chandler always expected that the fad would pass, he zealously advanced the technology, adapting axles from farming machinery, introducing tubular chassis and devising a cantilevered suspension system that has since become outmoded. He hired top drivers to compete against the likes of Anderson, who outfitted a 13,500-pound Grave Digger one year with a 2,600-horsepower engine--just about enough to lift it off the ground.

As the sport evolved, sanctioning bodies such as the United States Hot Rod Assn. and the Monster Truck Racing Assn. developed safety rules. Tire sizes were set at 5 1/2 feet, engines limited to 575 cubic inches--enough for about 1,500 horsepower. A minimum weight was established--10,000 pounds this year, 9,500 in the future--to control the trend toward ever-lighter, faster machines.

Anderson does not miss the big engine. “They done me a favor,” he says. “That was going to end up killing me.”

A sport that materialized from the silk hats of promoters has endured the inevitable questions about its legitimacy--and for good reason. Some races, like pro wrestling matches, are staged, especially in small indoor arenas, where real competition would create a hazard. The authentic races tend to be outdoors, like this one in Charlotte, where the night’s winner claims $5,000 and the drivers go as hard as they can go.

*

Side by side, Bigfoot and Grave Digger come down with shuddering force. Bigfoot lands near the end of the red-painted junkers, skipping off them like a stone on a pond and sailing across the finish line.

Grave Digger clears all the yellow cars, canting far to one side. The left front tire takes the full weight of the impact, ripping a 40-foot-wide divot in the turf, and the truck is hurled back to the right, bouncing, wheels jiggling, the whole thing rolling and swaying and finally pulling up far beyond the finish.

Bigfoot is declared the narrow winner, and driver Runte is ecstatic, recalling later how his early lead almost vanished. “I went up in the air and we were ahead of him,” he says. “The truck landed and I looked over to see where Dennis was, and all of a sudden there was a big old shower of dirt blowing by me.”

So far, the only trouble for Bigfoot is the on-board computer: It is recording but will not download data to the main unit in the pits, leaving the crew nothing to analyze. That does not prevent Bigfoot from trouncing Predator and moving into the semifinals.

Grave Digger has bigger problems. It advances as a fast loser, but rolls into the pits listing hard to port, like a ship going down. The crew has to re-pressurize the shocks and adjust the sway bars, work done hurriedly so Grave Digger can go on racing. The next opponent, Bear Foot, is a fearsome machine from Pontoon Beach, Ill., that once set a monster truck record by soaring 141 feet.

Bear Foot’s driver, Fred Shafer, is a 49-year-old ex-drag racer, another of the sport’s legends. He and Anderson wage a close race. They fly over the first cars dead even, and Grave Digger, fighting once again for control, partially skirts the second ramp. The trucks bound across the finish in almost a dead heat--but it is a bad race for both. Anderson is disqualified for not fully crossing the ramp. He is immediately reinstated because Bear Foot burns up a solenoid, a wire coil necessary for ignition, and can no longer race.

That stroke of fortune propels Digger into the semifinals against Snake Bite. Bigfoot will face Monster Patrol.

Anderson shakes his head, embarrassed to win on a fluke, but he’s in good spirits. He stands around between races, joking with his crew about the near-disastrous leap against Bigfoot.

“I said, ‘I could turn over right here--I’d better get my wheels doing something.’ I wasn’t lined up for the cars quite right, but I didn’t give a darn, I just went ahead and went for it.”

The Grave Digger image can be a “damn tough reputation to live up to,” Anderson says. “There’s a lot of times I really don’t want to go out there and tear up a brand new truck . . . and I’ll go out there and just push it to the limit, tear it up a lot of times, because that’s what the people expect of me.”

*

Night has fallen. The trucks appear again for the last few races, their paint and chrome glinting in the track-side arc lights. They look more imposing and otherworldly than ever.

In the first semifinal, Grave Digger faces Snake Bite and gets the faster start, spewing up clouds of orange dust and reaching the turn first. Snake Bite straightens out on the backstretch and accelerates in the low, efficient manner of Chandler’s trucks, nearly catching Grave Digger at the finish line. Anderson wins by less than a truck length.

Bigfoot’s opponent, Monster Patrol, is one of the toughest on the circuit: a striking black and green truck with a flashing light bar and monstrous air foil driven by Tom Meents, 30, of Paxton, Ill. Meents’ chief crewman is his father, Bill; together they do all their own engine work.

The race looks like another close one, the trucks roaring and sliding through the turn with Monster Patrol in a narrow lead. After the second jump, however, disaster hits Bigfoot: The transmission fails, the weakest link in the drive train. Runte veers sharply toward the infield, bypassing the last row of cars.

“One of those things . . . we lost third gear,” he says, and Bigfoot is out of it.

The finals will match Grave Digger against Monster Patrol. Rain is on the breeze and lightning dances across the heavens as they line up for the championship, their engines snorting, their front tires edging up and down the first mogul. The tree lights go green and away they go.

It is Monster Patrol through the turn, and Monster Patrol holding off the charging Grave Digger for the victory.

And so this time, neither legend triumphs.

Crossing the course again on the way to the pits, the two finalists perform one last series of jumps for the fans. Grave Digger does not complete the journey: An oil line comes loose and thick white smoke billows from inside the 1950 panel truck, then a small orange flash as the engine bursts into flames. Anderson scrambles out as an ambulance races across the infield. The pungent oil smoke wafts across the grandstand.

*

Out of Bounds

Far from jam-packed stadiums and the media glare, they pursue sport with a zealous abandon. Some are adrenaline junkies, chasing thrills at breakneck speed; others are tough-as-nails masochists, enduring 100-mile footraces across the desert. They clash in bone-jarring physical combat, or race souped-up, outlandishly designed machines over junk cars and moguls.

In this occasional series, The Times examines their world--the new frontier of extreme sports: the performers and the entrepreneurs, the social forces and market trends, the way these contests fit into the fabric of our culture.