Dan Runte has been driving monster trucks for 18 years, popping wheelies off ramps, crushing cars and whomping into the dirt.
He used to be sore after monster-truck shows such as the ones at Joel Coliseum on Friday and yesterday, but advanced suspensions have made the landings more forgiving than they used to be.
"They're a lot easier on your body," said Runte, who was driving the 16th incarnation of Bigfoot, the granddaddy of the monster-truck world.
One thing that hasn't changed in the nearly 33 years since Bigfoot's progenitors started crushing junkyard cars -- the noise. One monster truck is really loud. When six came out all at once last night, revving engines and spinning tires, it was the kind of loud that screams through both ears, meets in the middle of your head and feels like it's splitting your skull.
"Bring ear plugs," Kathleen Sawtelle, 12, advised during the pre-show, when fans mingled with drivers and Runte had just autographed her checkered flag.
"It'll make your ears ring -- that's for sure," said her dad, Butch, who also brought sons Thomas, 7, and Michael, 15, all of Kernersville.
It was a family crowd, with lots of children sporting earplugs.
Down in the dirt before the show, Curtis McHargue, 4, was posing for a photograph in front of a tire that was twice as tall as he, when an engine revved backstage. The ear-splitting roar sent Curtis running for the safety of his dad's arms.
But Curtis quickly bounced back. Back in the dirt, he led dad in search of Bigfoot.
"To him this is better than Christmas Day," his father, Steve McHargue said, following his son. "I can take him in Toys R Us and he won't look at anything but the monster trucks," McHargue said. "He loves monster trucks. That's the only toy he'll play with. I get him Hot Wheels and he runs over them with his monster trucks."
"I like monster trucks," Curtis said.
David Wayner of Sophia was there with his son, Michael, 8, and stepdaughter, Samantha Turner, 14.
"I like big trucks because they crush things," Samantha said.
Wayner figures the monster-truck shows are louder than a rock concert, but he's more into the technology.
"Just the horsepower the truck's got," he said. "It amazes me the amount of money they put into it to get them to run the way they do."
The trucks are custom-built, weighing in at about 9,000 pounds, with 66-inch-tall tires and generating as much as 2,000 horsepower.
Paul Strong, the driver of the truck called Martial Law, offered fans a cutaway view of a driver inside the tubular chassis last night as he roared around the coliseum floor. He'd flipped over on Friday and mangled so much of his truck's fiberglass body that they ripped the rest of it off for last night's show.
That's a rough way to treat a $150,000 truck, but Strong can afford it.
"I used to translate software and made a lot of money and bought a truck," he said.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
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