In It for the Long Haul
Mike Ryan’s semi-truck is no ordinary big rig, and Ryan is no ordinary truck driver.
Unlike most truckers, Ryan prefers moving fast to moving cargo.
More than 22 years as a Hollywood stuntman has given the 41-year-old Santa Clarita resident a mindset that lends itself well to racing.
It allows Ryan to survive in an environment that most people would shy away from.
Ryan’s most well-known on-screen work includes the semi-truck stunts in “Thelma and Louise” and “Terminator 2.”
His many off-screen activities include competing in international hillclimb events with his 4 1/2-ton, 1,200-horsepower Freightliner, a non-street-legal behemoth that has turned a 15.64-second quarter-mile at 90.59 mph on a dragstrip.
Ryan became inspired to race a big rig at the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb when he saw a factory-backed Navistar/Cummins semi competing in the 1996 race. He located one of the 30 trucks that were built for a defunct semi-truck oval track series, acquiring the vehicle for $25,000.
After securing minimal sponsorship, Ryan made his first assault on the 156-turn, 12.42-mile gravel course with the big rig in 1997, and obliterated the class record by 1 minute 8 seconds with a 14:40.65 clocking. What made the feat even more remarkable was that Ryan’s truck still had the offset chassis necessary for left-turn-only oval track racing.
The Navistar/Cummins factory-backed entry, which previously held the class record, had been designed specifically for the Pikes Peak event.
“The class specifications had been drawn up by Navistar and Cummins, to suit the newer design diesel engines,” Ryan said. “They basically waived the rules to let us run for the sake of competition.”
For the 1998 race, Ryan--armed with more sponsorship dollars because of his success the previous year--outfitted the truck with a new, more aerodynamic Freightliner body mounted on a chassis that was designed for dirt-track racing with the help of long-time Sprint Car builders Ken Bosse and Harold Jenkins. He took another 9.78 seconds off the class record despite having only one practice run.
The modifications were completed in only 5 1/2 weeks. The truck sat on a boat for 3 1/2 weeks because of an Australian longshoremen’s strike following its Easter victory at New Zealand’s inaugural Queenstown International Hillclimb.
“We [worked] seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day,” Ryan said. “[The Tuesday before the race] we started in Denver at the Freightliner dealer. Wednesday morning, 3:30 in the morning, we rolled it off the alignment rack, loaded it on the truck, drove down to Colorado Springs, unloaded, and I made the last half of the last practice day.”
Since there are not many opportunities to race such a vehicle, Ryan has set his sights on competing in various high-profile events, including the Silver State Classic Challenge in Nevada--for which a 90-mile section of public highway is closed and turned into a race course--and the Baja 1000.
He would also like to take a Class-8 big rig to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah for an assault on the unlimited diesel truck land speed record of 226.471 mph.
Ryan estimates the total expenditures on his machine to be between $150,000 and $200,000, mostly paid by sponsors.
One sponsor sees the support as a 9,600-pound opportunity for product research.
“This was more about the challenge and beating the challenge,” said Shell Oil spokesman Scott Williams, who met Ryan when they worked on a television commercial. “It’s an extreme test for our product.”
Williams and George Eidness, owner-president of a Denver Freightliner dealership, agreed their companies’ sponsorship had more to do with Ryan as a person than what he was attempting, a sentiment echoed by other sponsors’ representatives.
“We’re driven to be No. 1, and Mike’s got the same attitude,” said Mike McHorse, manager of marketing and product development for Freightliner Select Trucks, the manufacturer’s used-truck division. “When he goes out and wins, it reflects the same attitude we have in our business.”
Ryan’s interest in racing and semi-trucks developed during his childhood in the hills of Tennessee.
His best friend’s father owned a nursery, where Ryan spent a lot of time.
“Before I was old enough to have a driver’s license, I knew how to operate heavy equipment,” Ryan recalled.
In addition, he drove go-carts and motorcycles with his friends on the trails in the area, taking the machines apart when they broke down and putting them back together.
Ryan moved to California after graduating from high school and got a job as a boat mechanic at Newport Harbor, where he met stuntman Ronnie Ross through what Ryan calls “a fluke.”
At the time, Ryan owned a hot-rod Camaro, and he saw six Camaros that were used in the Ron Howard movie “Eat My Dust” parked at a local shop that specialized in Camaro parts.
“I asked the shop owner who the owner of the cars was, because I really wanted to meet a person who had that many nice Camaros,” Ryan said. “I found out and drove out to the man’s house and introduced myself cold.”
Ryan started spending time with Ross, doing free work on the elder stuntman’s cars. Within six months, Ryan performed his first paid stunt for a movie.
By Ryan’s estimate, it took him another seven years to get to the point where his income from stunt work was steady enough to support himself.
During that time, Ryan found another way to combine his love of cars with his fledgling movie career, starting a business that matched producers with owners of specialized vehicles who were willing to rent their cars to the studios.
The business catalogs more than 12,000 vehicles of every type, all of which will soon be viewable on the Internet at https://www.picturevehicles.com.
Ryan has found yet another way to put his unique knowledge to work. He performs accident reconstruction and serves as an expert witness in lawsuits arising from traffic collisions.
“You have an engineer saying, ‘This is what we think will happen,’ and you have a highway patrol officer saying, ‘This is what we think happened,’ ” Ryan said. “I’ve been in a situation where I can say, ‘This is what did happen,’ and that’s created a pretty unique niche.”
Ryan is unlike most racers in that he willingly acknowledges fear to outsiders. Between crashing his private plane into a mountain in New Mexico 13 years ago and seeing two colleagues burned when a movie stunt went awry last January, Ryan understands the potential consequences of his activities.
“All the set-ups and all the precautionary set-ups is what it’s all about,” Ryan said. “I think fear is the thing that can really surround you and enclose you, so I have to keep fear at bay. If you let fear overwhelm you, that’s not good.”
Keeping the fear at bay has allowed Ryan to keep on trucking.
