(RE-) CREATING A MONSTER

Daily Press - Newport News, Va.
Author: David Macaulay
Date: Nov 26, 2005

NEWPORT NEWS - Ray Mowery gazed at his truck the other day, its skin all smashed and sheared off in places, and allowed his mind to drift from the $4,500 repair bill that he's likely facing.

The News truck fanatic prefered to recall the roaring crowd, the pumping rock music and the adrenaline rush that he experienced a few nights before.

Before you start composing your feedback letters - accusing this newspaper of glorifying menace on the freeways of Hampton Roads - try to understand Mowery's world:

It's all about a few moments of blaring noise, followed by vehicular mayhem that quickly turns into jolts, impact and the certainty of costly body work.

Mowery drives a monster truck and gets paid to do it. When he slams around in packed arenas, he hears cheers, and a sponsor usualy pays for the repairs that usualy follow.

On Nov. 19, he entered his first local competition - the Monster Jam at the Hampton Coliseum.

Mowery ended up lying upside down in his 10,000-pound truck, Wild Hair, after flipping it for the first time in the freestyle section at the end of the show. But on a night when all but one of the trucks ended up disabled, Mowery was pleased with his home debut.

The hard part was picking himself up again and getting ready to fix hsi truck for the next show, "I will be repairing it in the next few days," he said Monday. "I've been feeling sick. Man those shows take their toll on you."

Mowery has always been an avid fan of monster-truck racing. He loved the excesses of this most extreme of motor sports in which pickup trucks are mounted on heavy 40-inch-wide tractor wheels and held together by towering precision-engineeredchassis.

The brightly painted giaants that bear names such as Grave Digger, Stone Crusher, and Eradicatorare pitted against each other in sporting arenas in short head-to-head races across scrap-yard cars or in freestyle eventswhere they're given points by a section of the crowd.

Mowery admits that he lives for the brief surges of power in his 1,400-horsepower truck, the adoration of the crowd and the frisson-the shiver-of danger as the leviathans lurch up on their rear wheels and take off over the jumps.

However, even Mowery admits that there are low points and that every few seconds of glammor has to be backed up by hours of hard toil away from the limelight. For every five minutes of this truck running, there's about 20 to 30 hours of maintenance," he said.some of the top teams have dozens of mechanics, but Mowery himself makes repairs in the body shop: "You get some help, but it's pretty much just me."

Wild Hair's rollover Nov. 19 week left the vehicle with its roof and three-quarters of the fiberglass skin ripped off. The repair bill will run between $3,000 and $4,500, a tab that will be picked up by some of Mowery's sponsors.

Earlier this week, Mowery returned to the trailer where he has Wild Hair stored behind Harris Truck & Auto Body Shop in Newport News to survey the damage to his 2003 Chevrolet Silverado. Putting the high-specification vehicles back together is a normal part of monster-truck racing. It can be even harder for the drivers to keep going.

RAY MOWERY        
monster-truck driver        

"You do feel low at times," Mowery said. "It can be tough to do it all over again. But I feel positive after the show, even though I did flip it over."

His first repair job will be to strip off the body shell to check whether Wild Hair is mechanically sound underneath. I believe it is, but I will need to get the body off to find out," he said.Then he'll be racing against the clock to get the truck ready for its next outing, in New Orleans on Dec. 4. "I don't think people really understand all the work that goes on behind the scenes," he said. "I can be working away for 20 hours a day on the truck."

Mowery is looking forward to his next home appearance, at the Coliseum in February. "I believe the crowd will know a lot more about me by then, and I will be more popular,"he said. The venue holds sentimental value for the driver who- as an awe-stuck 15-year-old in 1983 -witnessed the legendary Grave Digger's first appearance there. ON Nov. 19, Mowery got the chance to race head to head against Grave Digger. Even though he lost, he said, he was happy to just be in the same competition.

Mowery's truck, Wild Hair, competes in the wheelie competition Nov. 19 at the Hampton Coliseum. PHOTO BY ROB OSTERMAIR / DAILY PRESS

The roaring trucks have fascinated him since he was a boy. Mowery was brought up in Michigan and was present at the inception of monster-truck racing. "I was 12 years old, and I was at the first-ever monster-truck show at the Pontiac Silverdome (near Detroit) in 1980. That was the first time that Bob Chandler in BigFoot had driven his truck over cars for a paying audience. It was a truck and tractor pull at that time, and he was the only monster truck in the world. That put a little twinkle in my eye."

Three years later, while visiting his grandmother in Virginia for thanksgiving, he attended another truck and tractor pull at the Coliseum. "That's when Dennis Anderson with Grave Digger made his debut run," he said. "For somebody like me, it was cool because I was at the debut of the two biggest names in this industy. After watching Dennis run, I knew I could see myself doing this."

In 1989. Mowery worked as a volunteer who built the tracks for the monster jams at the Coliseum.

He graduated to working in the pit as a mechanic, but it was a long, hard, route to the driver's seat, he said. "Pretty much every year, I would end up doing more. It kept progressing over the years until I knew enough and kept telling myself that"s what I wanted to do," he said.

"Over the years, I was comfortable enough with the knowledge I had about this sport and my capabilities as an individual that I was able to pull it off, because there's so much work involved."

He finally turned professional when he bought Jason Witte's Wild Hair in 2004. He's completed 18 shows as a driver at locations as far away as Nova Scotia, Canada; Maine; and Louisiana.

He says his biggest success was beating BigFoot in Mississippi: "Even though I won the race, it was a big honorfor me to be considered even as an equal to BigFoot. I'm proof that if you persevere in life, no matter how many people tell you no, you can do it."

But Mowery admitted that there were times when he wondered whether he could make it. "I'm still battling that a bit now," he said.

The cost of a sport in which a single used tire could run $1,500 can be prohibitive for the less-well-known teams. Mowery remains upbeat in believing that monster-truck racing will become an increasingly popular sport that will bring in the big sponsors and eventually challenge NASCAR.

The sport takes over his home life, but Mowery said he couldn't do it without his wife, Kim, and children, Megan, andTravis. He even appears to have found a way for winning Kim over. "I plan on building another truck for her," he said. "We're going to call that Mrs. Wild Hair. She's only 4-foot-11, but she'll be racing in it."