The House That BIGFOOT Built: Behind the Scenes at Team BIGFOOT

For most gearheads, wintertime offers little more than bench racing and dreams of spring. But in the world of monster trucks—where racing happens almost year-round—the off-season lasts only from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. And if you’re part of Team BIGFOOT, that off-season is one of the busiest times of the year.

Over the course of a race season, Summit Racing/BIGFOOT driver Dan Runte and the other drivers (there are currently eight BIGFOOT trucks competing or appearing on any given weekend) spend up to six weeks at a stretch on the road. Each driver is a one-man operation. He or she drives the transporter; loads, unloads, and maintains the monster truck; drives in competition, and signs autographs.

Team BIGFOOT’s Bob Trent has business cards that read “Vice President of Sponsorship and Events.” That means he’s the guy with the unenviable job of scheduling BIGFOOT appearances. “We put in over 800 show days a year,” Bob told us. “For example, by December of last year (2006), we already had over 600 show days booked for 2007.”

That intensive schedule is what makes December an especially busy month at BIGFOOT world headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri. Most of the drivers bring their monster trucks and 18-wheelers back to the big garage for a few weeks of intensive maintenance. And when we say big garage, we mean big—there’s room to work on six BIGFOOT trucks, plus space to park one transporter rig.

As huge as it is, the garage is just a fraction of the BIGFOOT operation. There is a well-equipped machine shop, a design studio and paint shop, offices, and a museum detailing almost 30 years of BIGFOOT accomplishments. BIGFOOT #1, Bob Chandler’s original car-crushing Ford pickup, is also on display.

The garage is also home to any number of research and development projects, like testing new engine configurations or shock designs. The BIGFOOT team is more than willing to borrow ideas from drag racing, tractor pulling, Baja, or any other extreme machine it can find.

But the BIGFOOT gang is more than capable of inventing stuff, too. Take shocks, for example. A typical monster truck has more unsprung weight (weight not supported by the suspension) than sprung weight. The BIGFOOT team came up with some trick triple bypass nitrogen shocks to better control the truck. Even though the basic design is about five years old, the shocks are still state-of-the-art today.

 “A lot of teams look at our single shock/single air spring setup and want to know how we do it and all the numbers involved,” explains machinist Bryan Bertoletti. “Eventually they may figure out how to do it on their own—that’s why we’re always testing new things to stay a step ahead.”

When you run as many trucks as Team BIGFOOT does, interchangeability is not just a nice thing to have—it’s vital. “Uniformity is important to us,” John Peterson, BIGFOOT engine program chief, explains. “We like to be able to take the engine out of one truck and put it in another and have everything match up. It took us a long time to get to that point since everything was so custom to begin with. When we go to a new engine (configuration), we have to roll that out to eight vehicles at once. We have to make sure it’s right.”

As if December wasn’t busy enough, BIGFOOT headquarters plays host for the annual tech inspector’s school for the Monster Truck Racing Association (MTRA), the safety organization BIGFOOT creator Bob Chandler helped found. Dozens of drivers, mechanics, owners, and even fans come for several intense hours of tech education, led by Bob and Tim Hall, MTRA president and owner of Team Ramminator.

As if racing and maintaining eight monster trucks and transport rigs wasn’t enough, Team BIGFOOT is always busy finding new ways to entertain its legions of fans—and make legions of new fans. “We are hard at work on our kids show, BIGFOOT Presents: Meteor and the Mighty Monster Trucks. You’ll also be seeing more of professional wrestler turned monster truck driver Madusa driving for us,” Bob Trent says, “and we’ve even got a few surprises in store.”

Forget December—apparently, Team BIGFOOT is up to its tires in busy the whole darn year.

CLICK HERE to read more about BIGFOOT creator Bob Chandler and Summit Racing/BIGFOOT driver Dan Runte!