Bigfoot 5: When the Tires Became Taller Than People

These Were Not Truck Tires

The giant Firestone Tundra tires had not been designed for pickups, monster trucks or anything else likely to appear at a county fair. They came from a LeTourneau land train used by the U.S. military in Alaska during the 1950s, where enormous low-pressure tires helped haul tremendous loads across soft terrain without depending on roads.

For that job, the tires made perfect sense. Each stood roughly ten feet tall, about four feet wide and weighed in the neighborhood of 2,400 pounds.

Each.

Four of them represented close to five tons before anybody bothered adding a truck. Most people looking at that specification would have concluded that these were not suitable pickup tires.

Bob Chandler looked at them and reached the opposite conclusion. The pickup simply needed more work.

BIGFOOT Had Already Tried Them On

The Tundras did not go directly onto BIGFOOT 5. Chandler’s crew had experimented with them on earlier BIGFOOT trucks, including BIGFOOT 1, 2 and 4, which established two useful facts.

First, putting enormous military tires on an already enormous pickup attracted attention. This was not a difficult experiment to evaluate. People tended to notice when the tires beside them were taller than the building entrance.

Second, the normal monster-truck hardware was not especially pleased about carrying them. The standard BIGFOOT trucks had been built around 66-inch flotation tires, and suddenly those perfectly ridiculous tires were being asked to serve as the small ones.

The Tundras were almost twice as tall. Their weight alone could turn axles, frames and suspension components into participants in a durability test they had never volunteered to join.

This was no longer a tire upgrade. The tires were becoming the vehicle.

So Bob Built the Truck Around Them

BIGFOOT 5 was completed in the summer of 1986 for one very specific purpose: carry those ten-foot tires properly. That reversed the normal order of vehicle construction.

Ordinarily, somebody builds a truck and then selects tires that fit underneath it. Chandler already owned the tires. Now he needed enough truck to keep them organized.

Two standard pickup frames became part of the chassis. Five-ton military axles went underneath, sixteen gas-cell shocks helped control the machinery, and a Ford 460 sent power through a C6 automatic.

Then the ten-foot Firestones went on.

BIGFOOT 5 was ready.

Ready for what was still open to discussion.

It Wasn’t Really a Racing Truck

That timing made BIGFOOT 5 especially entertaining. By 1986, monster trucks were beginning to race seriously, and racing was teaching builders an irritating lesson: hauling unnecessary tons of machinery does not make the finish line arrive sooner.

Race trucks needed better suspension, less weight and quicker acceleration. BIGFOOT 5 headed directly away from all three.

Those giant tires were far too heavy for serious racing, and the truck was far too massive to behave like the increasingly athletic machines that would follow. That was fine. BIGFOOT 5 had already won its event before anybody fired the engine.

All it had to do was sit there.

Anybody standing beside one tire understood the program.

Then Bob Added Four More Tires

Four ten-foot tires might sound sufficient, but sufficient had never been the organizing principle behind this project. At its first major appearance, the Fall Jamboree in Indianapolis, BIGFOOT 5 wore dual ten-foot tires.

Eight of them.

The truck had already reached the point where one tire looked like farm machinery had swallowed a small building. Bob now mounted another one beside each of those, because evidently the first version still left spectators with a few unused degrees of peripheral vision.

The result was enormous in every direction: taller, wider and heavier than the monster trucks surrounding it. BIGFOOT had spent years becoming the truck everybody else tried to match.

BIGFOOT 5 looked as though Chandler had decided the competition deserved a vacation.

The Numbers Quit Sounding Like a Pickup

With the giant tires installed, BIGFOOT 5 stood roughly 15 feet 6 inches tall. The tires alone were taller than almost anybody standing beside them, and a single tire weighed more than many complete automobiles.

Later configurations of the truck were listed at well over 30,000 pounds. At that point calling the thing a pickup was mostly a family-history reference.

A normal F-250 could park underneath parts of it. A person beside one wheel barely reached halfway up the tire, while the driver’s seat had migrated into territory normally accessed with scaffolding.

This was not a lifted Ford anymore.

It was architecture with a transmission.

And That Was Exactly the Point

Early monster trucks worked because the audience already understood the original object. Everybody knew what a Ford pickup looked like, so when Chandler parked one nearby with tires taller than the roof of their car, no technical presentation was necessary.

The visual comparison did all the work.

BIGFOOT 5 pushed that idea beyond comparison. Nobody needed to know the horsepower, axle ratio or suspension geometry. Nobody even needed to watch it crush cars.

Stand beside one tire.

There was the show.

Guinness Eventually Made It Official

BIGFOOT 5 became recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest monster truck, which sounds less like a surprise than the final paperwork on something Chandler had been working toward accidentally for years.

The original BIGFOOT began as his personal Ford pickup. He modified it because he enjoyed four-wheeling and kept breaking things, then used the increasingly absurd truck to advertise his shop.

After that it crushed cars. Monster trucks became a business. Racing started. Each step rewarded machinery that attracted more attention than whatever had appeared the year before.

Eventually Bob built one so large that racing it was almost beside the point.

Then the Sport Went the Other Direction

That may be the best part of BIGFOOT 5. It represented the absolute limit of the original monster-truck formula: bigger tires, bigger axles, bigger truck, continue until somebody runs out of available tire.

At the same time, racing was beginning to reward the opposite ideas. Less weight. Better suspension. Lower centers of gravity. Purpose-built frames. Trucks that could jump, turn and get to the finish line without carrying the equivalent of a small house along for the ride.

Within a few years, the advanced monster truck would become smaller and lighter than BIGFOOT 5. It would be better at racing, better at jumping and better at almost everything except standing still and making people stop walking.

BIGFOOT 5 remained undefeated there.

The Tires Came First

That is what makes BIGFOOT 5 proper Mechanical Lunacy. There was no competition requiring a truck this large and no practical problem demanding ten-foot tires. Earlier BIGFOOTs had already demonstrated that the tires were too much for ordinary monster-truck hardware.

A sensible conclusion was sitting right there.

Bob ignored it and built hardware big enough for the tires.

Then, for the truck’s debut, he mounted eight of them.

Most engineers begin with a vehicle and calculate the tire size it requires. BIGFOOT 5 began with the tires and calculated how much vehicle they demanded.

The answer was quite a bit.