Truck Racing. Encyclopedia of World Sport

Trucks have become widely accepted as racing vehicles
since 1970.While most truck racing is focused on pickups and other small vehicles, large tractor-trailer cabs
are also raced. Both track and off-road races are held.
History
For many years, interest in four-wheel-drive vehicles
and pickup trucks was limited to small groups of enthusiasts, and competitions were often very informal.
That began to change around 1960, as light pickup
trucks and other utility vehicles started to became
more popular among general consumers. Manufacturers developed a wide variety of hybrids that combined
characteristics of passenger cars with utility vehicles,
such as the International Harvester Scout, which resembled a very large station wagon.
In the 1970s and 1980s consumer utility and recreational vehicles became major segments of the automotive market. By 1995, they were outselling conventional sedans in many regions. This prompted a
parallel surge of interest in the use of these vehicles in
sports. Television also made events like remote offroad races more accessible to general viewers.
Rules and Play
Pickups and other recreational and utility vehicles
compete in a variety of off-road sports, from shorter
timed races to longer endurance events. Among them
are the Baja series of desert races, the Pikes Peak Hillclimb, and the Camel Trophy Mundo Maya ’95, a grueling 20-day race through Central America. Certain types
of contemporary truck racing are very similar to their automotive counterparts, or are divisions of auto-oriented racetrack sports, such as National Association of
Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) Super Truck racing.
Prominent racer and promoter Mickey Thompson
(who died in 1988) developed stadium truck racing, a
sport that combined off-road with closed-track racing.
Dirt tracks were set up in outdoor racetracks and later
in indoor stadiums. Other truck sports also take place
in these venues, including truck-pulling competitions.
Trucks gained an important foothold in the world of
traditional closed-track stock-car racing in 1994,
NASCAR established a new Super Truck division. Super
Trucks are modified pickups that adhere to rules and
guidelines for engines and body construction similar
to those for NASCAR stock cars. Super Truck races are
much like NASCAR’s Winston Cup series and other
stock car events. Trucks also became more widely used
in drag-racing, and the National Hot Rod Association
established a category for modified trucks used as
dragsters.
The truck-racing scene went through much flux in
the 1980s and early 1990s. New sports were developed,
and major racing associations added events or divisions for trucks and sport-utility vehicles.Although not
all of the new truck-racing circuits or events succeeded
or survived, utility vehicles were well established in
competitive motor sports by the mid-1990s. Given the
growing interest in stock car racing, the subcategory of
truck racing has a promising future.
—JOHN TOWNES
Bibliography: Geist, Bill. (1994) Monster Trucks & Hair-in-aCan: Who Says America Doesn’t Make Anything Anymore?
New York: Putnam. Excerpted as “Really Big Trucks.” New
York Times Sunday Magazine (23 October 1994).

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *