South Berwick’s Kyle Chandler prepares to dominate the monster truck circuit 
In Berwick, there be monsters.

One beast rests in the fluorescent glow of a garage workshop on busy Rochester Road, behind the Berwick Travel Agency and Hall Brothers Roofing. Thirteen feet long and 13 feet tall, two black stripes run from its head to its tail, and five-foot diameter claws grip at the ground. Painted along the sides of its sleek Dodge Ram body is the creature’s name: Dominator. If Dominator were awake, one could imagine tendrils of smoke rising from its mouth. At its heart is a Hemi engine that puts out 2,000 horsepower.

“It’s a lot of fun to take a 10,000-pound machine and jump it 15 feet in the air and race it at 60 mph or faster,” says the vehicle’s owner, 25-year-old Maine native Kyle Chandler. He’s just finished his work for the day at Hall’s Auto Center in Berwick, repairing cars and trucks that could easily fit beneath Dominator’s huge tires. “I eat, breath, and sleep monster trucks,” he says.    

For five years now, Chandler has been racing the behemoths. He is an up-and-coming star in a motor sport that draws 10 million fans each year to stadiums around the country. He has driven a long list of monster trucks, including Wildfire, which was in the movie “Rat Race”; the WWE truck Stone Cold 3:16; the Goldberg truck, owned by WCW wrestler Bill Goldberg; and Dominator, which he has been racing for two years and is the only working monster truck in Maine.

Racing at events across the country on weekends, Chandler holds down a full-time job at Hall’s Auto Center during the week, often working for eight to 10 hours a day and spending four or five hours a night repairing and maintaining Dominator, which constantly needs fixing.

Currently Chandler is awaiting confirmation to participate in United States Hot Rod Association sanctioned events—the largest and most competitive monster trucking events on the planet. As a USHRA driver he’ll be at a level where he can compete regularly against the most popular trucks in the sport.

born to run
How did a gear-junkie from Maine end up on the threshold of becoming one of the top monster truck racers in the country? Taking apart his first engine when he was 5, Chandler has always had an interest in anything that uses a motor and is fast and competitive. When he was 11, he began competing in the World Karting Association, racing up and down the East Coast against other kids his age. He sustained his first and only injury in motor sports when he was 14, after bouncing off the outside wall during the final lap of a go-cart race at the Sugarhill Speedway in Weare, while fighting for third place. He broke his back and foot, but two weeks later returned to the driver’s seat with his racing suit modified to fit around the cast on his leg.

After go-carts, Chandler began racing faster machines with bigger engines—performance race cars, mud trucks (normal-sized trucks raced through huge mud-pits) and, finally, monster trucks. His first truck, Wildfire, was a ride truck—a modified pick-up on monster truck wheels with seats in the back for passengers. From there he got behind the wheel of his first race truck, Stone Cold 3:16, when the truck’s owner came up short a driver and let Chandler fill in for an event in Rutland, Vt. “I was a little nervous,” says Chandler about his first time racing at 20 years old. “I just went slow enough to keep myself on the ground.”

By the time of his first competition, Chandler had decided that racing monster trucks was for him. He struck up a partnership with two local business owners, Paul Kennedy, owner of Hall’s Auto Center, and Dana Hall, owner of Hall Brothers Roofing.

Purchasing an unfinished truck, Chandler created and customized his own monster. Under the glow of overhead lights in his workshop, tools are scattered across work tables and lying on the concrete floor. There’s barely room to squeeze between the work tables and the truck’s body, with very little space to accomplish the necessary lifting of the truck and tightening of parts. The only link to the outside world is the light that filters through the small window in the garage door. In this space, Chandler finished his monster, adding an engine and completing the wiring and hydraulics, spending in all about $150,000 to build it.

And, after several days of careful debate, a name for the monster was found, one that closely matched Chandler’s own ambitions for the sport: Dominator.    

the thrill of the race
When a race weekend rolls around, which can be every weekend in a month to one race every couple of months, Chandler will take Friday off work, pack up his truck, race suit, helmet and repair tools, and head to the competition with any support team, friends or cheerers he can find—usually his fiancée Vanessa and Paul Kennedy. By Monday, he’ll be back to repairing vehicles at Hall’s.

“It’s pretty much scheduled from one event to the other,” says Chandler about his 30-35 races throughout the year. Several times he’s even gotten calls on a Wednesday night to be at a competition as far away as Florida on Friday morning. 

Dominator, and Chandler’s current ride truck, Big Daddy, are transported to competitions in one of two trailer rigs outifitted for life on the road, complete with cramped living quarters and an entire workshop, where almost anything that could break on the truck can be fixed. During transport, the monster truck wheels are traded in for smaller, normal-sized truck wheels, and the big tires are hauled in the trailer.

“It’s not what people make it out to be,” says Kennedy, who accompanies Chandler to nearly all his competitions to help with repairs and to drive Big Daddy. It’s often about 30 hours on the road once you leave, Kennedy says, then at least two days of competing, intermingled with repairing the vehicle, before you pack up and head home on another 30-hour drive.

But Chandler lights up when he describes the thrill of competing, recalling driving Dominator over and through buses, vans, campers, motor homes, ambulances, dumpsters and stacks of three or four full-sized, steel-bodied cars. He remembers the Paul Schafer World Finals in Deland, Fla., in fall 2005, when he and several other monster truck drivers arrived to see a stack of about 50 cars piled upon one another in the middle of the dirt arena. “We were all standing around thinking, ‘Oh God,’” Chandler says. It was a joke played by the race organizers. Another time, Kennedy, driving Big Daddy, almost backed over a wide-eyed food vendor who saw his life pass before his eyes. The food vendor was OK, says Kennedy, but everyone knew who the guy driving Big Daddy was after that.

And Chandler recalls the work that he has had to do to prepare Dominator to race. After every event, the damage done to the truck must be repaired in time for the next show, which could be anywhere from a few hours to the following day. Regardless of the long days and nights, Chandler still loves running things over—especially campers. “They disintegrate and it makes a mess,” he says. Another favorite is buses: “A school bus can put you 30 feet in the air.”

show time
The audience at the Thunder Nationals heads up to the second and third tiers of plastic seats at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester. The bottom tier is closed off because of the risk of flying debris—giant wheels, truck parts, whatever. The arena is loud with excited fans sporting NASCAR shirts and hats, often holding ear protection for their children and grandparents. Some brandish signs of support for their favorite trucks. As the announcer finishes his welcome to the crowd, barely audible over the sound of motors, the lights of the arena begin to dim. Fans roar their approval as six 10,000-pound metal monsters are driven out onto the concrete floor, their massive motors spitting fumes and thundering responses to the cheering crowds. The announcer says each of their names in turn: American Guardian, Anger Management, Thrasher, Superman, Towasaurus Rex and the always popular Madusa.

Drivers take their machines for a spin around the two rows of red and yellow painted “crush” cars parked in the center of the arena before coming to a stop and squeezing through their windows to wave to the crowd. The drivers are heroes to some and their trucks are icons to many, each vehicle known for a distinctive feature—the fiberglass red cape across the truck bed, the “American Woman” song by Lenny Kravitz playing each time the truck is introduced, or the truck dedicated to American military forces.

The trucks square off in pairs, drivers starting at the back of the arena and punching their accelerators as they jump or wheelie over their own rows of three crush cars. Each driver tries to pull off the best wheelie or the most exciting freestyle jump. The more wild and destructive the performance, the better the scores drivers will receive from the panel of judges chosen from among the fans. Car parts fly and the trucks reverberate as they smash to the floor from an almost perpendicular airborne position. They leave in their wake mangled car parts: a hood wrenched free, roofs caved in, trunks burst open like squeezed oranges. Again and again the trucks compete and the cars become flatter, less distinct as cars, and more like the heaps you see at vehicle junkyards, compressed thin and stacked one atop another. It’s metal mayhem, destruction at its heady best.

The sport of monster truck racing began in the early 1980s when chrome-crunching, lifted pick-ups began appearing at fairs and arenas around the nation to do one thing: run over cars. Bigfoot owner Bob Chandler (no relation to Kyle) is credited as the first driver to smash and bash over two cars at a packed arena in Pontiac, Mich., in 1982. From there the trucks only got bigger—larger tires, stronger suspension, and tougher chassis to protect the drivers from being crushed in a rollover. Now the motor sport has gone international, with monster truck competitions in Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia.

USHRA is the nation’s largest organizer of monster truck events, hosting 300 competitions across the country every year. Out of the 300 or more monster trucks operating here, only about 100 are USHRA sanctioned, driven by some of the most skillful drivers in the business. As a driver for USHRA, Chandler’s opportunities to race will increase many-fold as he can compete at the most popular monster trucking events in the world, including one of the largest, the Superbowl of Motorsports held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, and the Monster Jam World Finals in Las Vegas, the premier monster trucking event on the planet. The bigger the events, the higher the payout, with the potential for larger sponsors along the way as more wins come.

In racing, monster trucks negotiate a course while maneuvering over all manner of jumps and obstacles. In freestyle events, the monster truck drivers showcase their talents, typically in a set time between one and two minutes, by taking their beasts off jumps, spinning in circles, crashing through and over vehicles, and exciting the crowd with what they want to see most—total destruction. A monster truck driver may perform a sky wheelie (when the truck stands up on its rear tires with the front tires and grill directly above the rear tires), T-bone (crashing head-on into the side of an obstacle), or doughnuts (when the truck spins in circles in one spot).

The competition is fierce as friends and rivals go head-to-head, gunning for a first place finish. But before and after events, when adrenalin levels return to normal, many of the drivers are friends. Most drivers know each other, says Kennedy, and they all meet up with each other at shows and park their rigs side-by-side during the pit party (a meet-the-drivers event with fans, which typically occurs at every monster truck competition). Once the helmets go back on, though, it’s another story. “We hope that someone breaks something,” says Chandler, laughing.

making a living
Chandler has put several of the trucks he’s driven, including Dominator, on their sides, but hasn’t flipped one over yet. Too much damage to the truck can cost the driver big money. According to USHRA.com, the average monster truck engine costs about $35,000. The fiberglass truck body costs around $3,000, and the 66-inch high, 43-inch wide tires, of which a truck typically goes through eight in a year, cost about $2,600 apiece. And monster truck crews usually carry spare parts for their machines, including an engine. Last year alone, Chandler had to replace the body once, rebuild the engine completely, and replace the transmission. That’s why 90 percent of the profit he makes from racing goes back into the truck or toward traveling costs.    

So, how do drivers make enough money to support themselves? Each event typically has a payout whether the drivers win or lose, says Kennedy. The amount of the payout depends on the size of the event, and bigger name drivers earn more to appear at a competition. But the big money is in winning. A first-place finish in either freestyle or racing can send the driver home with around $5,000.

Chandler is slowly gaining ground in his quest to be among the most recognized drivers. At the Paul Schafer World Finals, he raced to a sixth place finish out of a field of 14 of some of the fastest drivers in the country, and flew 25 to 30 feet in the air, his highest jump yet, during the freestyle event. In December 2005 he competed in the second monster truck circuit ever in Mexico, traveling to the Mexican cities of Puebla, Monterrey and Torreon to race and freestyle. Overall in the circuit, he placed second in the freestyle and third in racing against six other trucks from the United States. And in early 2006 in Columbus, Ga., Chandler drove Dominator to two wins, placing first in the racing and second in the freestyle event.

In the sport of monster trucks, creativity and experience are everything. “(Creativity) is their key characteristic,” says Shawn Hancock, owner of Monster-Style.com. “They have to have a trademark.” The drive to stand out among hundreds of other trucks has yielded a plethora of unique names and designs, like The Broker, a monster truck dedicated to businessmen everywhere, and Towasaurus Rex, which has the body of a 1946 Chevy antique tow truck. And many of the drivers have pasts just as colorful and interesting as their vehicles. Madusa, driver of the truck of the same name, is a former WWF women’s wrestling champion, and Chad Fortune, who drives Superman, played in the NFL for the Miami Dolphins and Chicago Bears. 

So what makes Dominator unique besides the detail of a skull wearing a Viking helmet painted on its side? It has a Hemi.

Typically, monster trucks run Chevrolet motors that put out between 1,300 and 1,500 horsepower, but while the Chevy engines aren’t specifically designed for racing, the Hemi is. The price of using the Hemi is a little extra maintenance after each time it runs, which is why most drivers and owners prefer the Chevy engines.

Not Chandler. “It idles at the line and runs wide open,” he says. “There’s no substitute for horse power.”

the future
Chandler is currently participating in the Canadian Maritime Series, 26 weekends of consecutive races in Canada, including a 12-hour ferry ride to several competitions in Newfoundland.    

At the end of summer, though, is his favorite competition. Chandler has achieved local fame in New Hampshire and Maine, and he can hardly grab a cup of coffee in downtown Berwick without someone asking how his racing has been going.

So when he races at the Rochester fairgrounds every year, many of his fans show up to give him the hometown advantage. He has won the racing event in Rochester for the past two years and won the freestyle last year, against trucks like Monster Patrol, Iron Horse and Bear Foot.

In a sport ruled by adrenalin junkies and auto racing hotshots, his real secret weapon may be his slow burn to stay in the sport for the long haul.

“Hopefully to be famous,” says Chandler when asked where he wants to be in 20 years. “It’s hard saying not knowing.”

For Kyle Chandler, his goal is to make it to the top. And not just to the top of a three-story pile of cars.