Monster Truck Madness – 10 Years of Fun
Hey everyone and Happy Thursday!
This week marks 10 years of writing for Big Squid, which is pretty crazy to me. Back in 2013, I remember reading the site and seeing they were looking for someone to write a weekly blog on the world of Scale RC, which at the time was starting to REALLY boom. I was running a new r/c trailing club at the time called Show-Me Scalers and getting WAY into that scene, so I figured I’d like to try my hand at it. I had recently met Tim and Cubby at a scale event they were covering, so I messaged them and they talked to Brian, owner of BSRC. They collectively decided to give me a shot (thanks guys!). Here is my first post on the site.
While I was into crawlers, my longtime interest was always monster trucks. Full size, r/c, diecast, display models, whatever. As the scale scene kept growing in popularity, solid axle r/c monster trucks started to go from an underground thing to more popular as more applicable parts started to get released to simplify building one.
The guys I had been crawling with in my scale r/c club decided to start dabbling with r/c mega trucks, and we were having so much fun with them that we decided to try hosting a mega truck mud race which would be held as a side event to a large RECON G6 crawling event. This mega truck race, which you can see the original coverage of here, was so much fun that my attention immediately shifted from crawling over to mega/monster trucks.
It was from there that Trigger King R/C was started in Summer 2014. While the mega mud trucks were initially the focus, within a few months it shifted totally to monster trucks. Now at the time, it was mainly modded Tamiya Clod Busters and home brew Axial based shaft trucks. That particular scene kept growing though, as mainstream r/c racing companies like JConcepts and Pro-Line started releasing actual scale monster truck tires and accessories. This would’ve been unheard of a mere few years before.
Then, in 2016 Axial released the SMT10 and solid axle monster trucks exploded in popularity. Trigger King was running large scale races every month at this time, and I was totally engrossed in everything r/c monster truck related. It was around then that Mr. Brian allowed me to switch to talking monster trucks, and that’s what I’ve been doing since (ok, I still sneak in some crawler stuff or other things, but still)!
In all that time, probably my favorite thing to cover was the launch of the Losi LMT. That was a ton of fun. The truck was great, but it also sort of the cherry on top for the whole solid axle monster truck scene, as it was the true acknowledgement that this was a segment of the hobby with staying power.
On the bashing side of things, it’s also been fun to see how brands like Traxxas and Arrma have evolved over the years. The releases of the X-Maxx and Kraton were a ton of fun, respectively.
I’ve met a lot of fantastic friends due to Big Squid RC, and thank you all for reading my nonsense over the last decade! I’ve much more to spout over the coming years!
Until next time, keep it on all 4’s!
