Showmen, Stunts & Spectacle
You Should Have Seen This
Winning is entertaining.
It isn’t the only thing people will buy a ticket to see.
Racing figured that out early.
Pick Your Spectacle: Backup Girls | Fire Burnouts | Little Red Wagon | Hemi Under Glass | Wild Bill Shrewsberry | Bigfoot Car Crush | Monster-Truck Backflip
A burnout could become part of the act. A truck that accidentally stood on its rear bumper could become more valuable doing wheelstands than racing normally. Crush a few junk cars with an oversized pickup and suddenly promoters wanted the truck instead of wondering why anybody had built it.
Then somebody added fire.
Somebody else stood up through a windshield.
Eventually a twelve-thousand-pound monster truck went upside down on purpose.
This bunch isn’t primarily about winning races. It is about the moment when racing became a show.
The best exhibition racers understood that the crowd did not need a stopwatch to know it had seen something worth remembering.
Jungle Jim Liberman understood that backing up from a burnout did not have to be dead time.
Funny Cars already had noise, smoke and enough horsepower to make reasonable people back away from the guardrail. Somebody decided the burnout still needed improving.
The Dodge A100 was supposed to race with the front tires on the pavement. The truck had a different idea, and the crowd had an opinion about that.
Putting a Hemi behind the driver in a Barracuda solved one engineering problem and immediately created a much more entertaining one.
A wheelstand apparently wasn’t enough entertainment for Wild Bill Shrewsberry if the driver remained sensibly seated behind the steering wheel.
Bob Chandler had already built a Ford pickup large enough to attract a crowd. Then somebody put junk cars in front of it.
By 2010, launching several tons of monster truck through the air was beginning to look almost conventional. Cam McQueen had another idea.
Bottom Line
Racing has always needed speed.
Entertainment needs something people remember.
Sometimes the two are the same thing.
Sometimes the memorable part is a wall of fire, a Barracuda on two wheels, a driver sticking through a windshield or Bigfoot turning a junk car into floor covering.
Then monster trucks started doing backflips and moved the definition of ridiculous another few feet down the road.
The showmen understood the rule long before anybody needed a marketing department to explain it: give the crowd something they can talk about tomorrow.
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