The rest of the rig seems all tires-a bulging, absurd mountain of rubber. Up close, Bigfoot’s pillbox body towered over my six-foot frame. The thing’s relative size made me feel like a kid, when doorknobs were eye hazards and my grandpa had to lift me into his work truck. You might expect the old Ford to feel small by modern standards, as old cars do. Today, at least, the truck was off its leash. Imagine Bigfoot crawling behind a Girl Scout float. The old truck didn’t languish, participating in the odd demo and appearing at local events, but by 2019, it had become an antique, idling through a few parades per year. Nearly a decade of abuse had taken its toll. By 1979, at its first paid appearance, in Denver, promoters coined the term “monster truck.”Ĭhandler retired Bigfoot 1 in 1982. In 1977, it was the first truck to sit on the show floor at SEMA. Bigfoot the machine officially debuted at events across the Midwest in 1975.
“My general managers called me ‘Bigfoot.’ They said, ‘If you’d keep your big foot out of the throttle, then you wouldn’t have any problems.’ I liked that.” “I’d come back every Monday to the shop with a broken truck,” Chandler chuckled. The Ford’s tires and engine displacement grew. He swapped broken axles for five-ton military units scavenged from junkyard rigs. He stormed Midwest tractor pulls, mud bogs, river runs, hill climbs-any event where he could spackle the truck in mud and entice clients. The truck was impressing other people, because they’d come into the shop and want the same thing: bigger tires and on and on.”Ĭhandler kept on, too. So I put bigger tires on it, and, well, when you put bigger tires on, you start breaking axles. “I had a shop, Midwest 4x4, and I liked going four-wheeling with the truck. “Bigfoot kind of just happened,” said Bob Chandler Sr., 78, the former hobbyist who built the first monster truck. Up front, a café and gift shop greeted eager tourists while office staff organized a global monster-truck empire.
Oversize work bays held the latest Bigfoot trucks. Behind the garages of a former tractor-repair shop, the day-to-day operations of Bigfoot 4x4 Inc. There it sat, awash in light from the rising Missouri sun. This story originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Road & Track. Four generations of monster-truck enthusiasts claim Bigfoot as their own, but my mind conjures just one: Bigfoot 1, a 1974 Ford F-250. There have been 22 Bigfoot iterations since 1974, spitting mud and sound across nearly every county in America and packing stadiums with adoring fans.