Monster Truck Madness – Ramp Ridin’

When it comes to monster truck racing, nay, any kind of r/c racing, the talk is usually centered around the vehicles. The track usually plays second fiddle. However, the way a track is built arguably has way more effect on how the race goes versus the way the actual trucks are set up.

When it comes to solid axle monster truck racing, there are usually small ramps set up all over a track, to mimic the jumps a full size monster would see on the stadium circuit. For the longest time, we just used standard triangular ramps that were built by attaching a flat piece of wood to several cut 2×4 blocks for height. You can see a pic above. Nothing special, but they got the job done.

The problem is that this creates a bit of uncertainty for how the trucks fly, given that they are sort of just smacking a piece of wood and then taking off versus having a slope to “launch” off of. The slope face is much more close to what a real monster would see, thanks to their penchant for racing on dirt. One of our club members decided to make new ramps for us last winter, and the results were awesome. These new ramps let the trucks fly like the big boys. You can see a pic below of both how they were assembled, as well as what they looked like after being painted up.

As the saying goes, “The only reward for doing good work is the addition of more work.”, so we’ve now tapped our guy to build freestyle obstacles for us, and he’s almost got the first one finished. Aaron, our good friend and fellow racer who is doing the work, is a real craftsman in how he puts these things together.

So yeah, our first centerpiece obstacle is this big pyramid, which is being built to be a replica of the large freestyle obstacle that’s currently used on the Toughest Monster Truck Tour, arguably the best full scale, arena sized tour going today. Here’s a shot of the real one, with the r/c replica (sans paint and attached cars) below.

This $*** gonna be cray. Big thanks to Aaron for his work, here. Not only are we going to go huge with our solid axle trucks, but you’ll find this monstrosity making its way into Big Squid torture tests, mwhahahaha.