Brawny trucks a smash with big fair crowd
Four seconds of pure power.
That is monster truck racing.
And that's part of the reason Ken Donat has emceed events for nearly 20 years.
"It's the testosterone, the noise," he said. "It's the noise and the horsepower. That's what keeps me coming back."
Donat served as the emcee of the Kane County Fair's first monster truck race that pitted six professional drivers against one another Thursday night. Brutus beat Holman's Beast in the final.
Between the race and a freestyle event that featured several trucks doing doughnuts, getting high up in the air and doing wheelies while landing a jump, Megasaurus, a three-story-high machine, destroyed a compact car and left it in flames.
With the trucks equipped with 2,000-horsepower engines, it can be a dangerous environment.
But several 1,800-pound barricades lined the edge of the arena.
Also, every truck had a remote, automatic kill switch. Before every run, whether it was racing over cars or a freestyle trick run, coordinators tested the switches.
Bob Holman, who owns Iron Man and was behind the wheel of Holman's Beast, has been in the sport for 25 years.
"I've done just about every stupid thing you can do," he said.
He said he's rolled his truck 19 times for different reasons, including hitting a row of cars at the wrong angle.
He said when his vehicles do suffer damage, it is usually just cosmetic fixes that cost from $2,500 to $5,000.
His career as a monster truck driver has taught him many things, not the least of which is a driver's responsibility to learn the nuances and personality of every truck.
"You don't respect this truck, it'll let you know who is the boss real quick," he said.
Steve and Joanne Longmire brought their children, 9-year-old Dan and 3-year old Mike, to the show.
They have lived in Naperville 21 years and Steve said it was their first time attending the Kane County Fair.
"We had never seen it before," he said. "It was very entertaining."
While Mike owns a small toy Brutus truck and was excited to see his toy come to life at the show, Dan's favorite part had to do with destruction.
"The Megasaurus destroying the car," he said of his favorite part. "The burning."
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