“You’re going to catch some air,” says Tristan England, driver of the JCB Digatron Monster Jam truck, the subject of this year’s Christmas road test.
This was unexpected. If you’ll excuse the behind-the-scenes indulgence, sometimes we get a brief go in a Christmas road test vehicle, sometimes an extended run, but often – if it’s, say, the Space Shuttle – no go at all.
Our first nose around the Digatron was in JCB’s test and demonstration quarry in Staffordshire, which is full of sharp immovable objects and very much ‘no go’ territory. But, suggested JCB, if you can come to the broad expanse of Monster Jam University, that can be amended.
I expected to arrive there and be given a short pootle around a yard. Instead, as I pull on fireproof race overalls, England tells me: “It’s going to be a thrill rush the whole time. Your adrenaline is going to be pumping.” Autocar is going to learn to jump a monster truck.
The JCB Digatron is one of the newest trucks running in Monster Jam, the world’s biggest monster truck series. Founded in 1992, the series easily fills huge stadiums with truck competitions that feature racing, two-wheel skills and freestyle stunt elements.
Before Monster Jam arrived, monster trucks were for the most part ordinary trucks with big lift kits and agricultural tyres, and would travel around the US putting on shows that featured, say, driving over scrap cars.
Today’s Monster Jam truck is a far more serious piece of kit, a bespoke bit of engineering, and Monster Jam itself is a vast enterprise that operates dozens of trucks across multiple events, each with tens of thousands of spectators, frequently at the same time.
It’s not unusual for there to be three, four or even five different Monster Jam events taking place at once across different stadiums, eight trucks competing at each. It’s a big business, family-friendly entertainment, and the trucks need to be extremely robust, specially engineered for reliability and durability, to perform at a level that, as England says, “can give the fans an event of a lifetime”.
It’s why one of the very newest from the box, the JCB Digatron, is a worthy subject for this year’s Christmas road test.
Design and engineering
Monster Jam trucks measure 5.5m long and around 3.2m to 3.6m tall and, for the most part, the dozens that Monster Jam runs are the same as each other, save for the fact that one might look like a van and another a dog.
They all have a steel spaceframe chassis with the engine in the middle. It’s an 8.8-litre (540cu in) drag motor that burns methanol and makes in the region of 1320bhp. (US horses being the same as ours, there’s no need for a clumsy conversion.)
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