We’re lovers of old school monster trucks here at BangShift and so are lots of our readers. Canadian reader Glen Robins is one of them and he recently visited an interesting site in Canada that we’re pretty sure represents the world’s only monster truck boneyard. The collection of retired and rotting trucks were all owned and operated by a single Canadian family that pioneered the sport up in the Great White North.

We discovered an interesting irony about the beginnings of monster truck competition in Canada. For a country with such vast expanses of land, it was tiny arena shows where the trucks came into their own. Big stadiums are not that common up in Canada due to the population spread and other reasons. Hockey arenas however exist in virtually every city and they served as the incubator to get the sport hatched and guys like Glen Robins hooked as kids.

Here’s some background info in Glen’s own words:

I took a trip up to Hotel & Restaurant Madrid this past Saturday, a tourist-y highway exit stop halfway between Montreal and Quebec City. It is home to some old school monster trucks owned by the Arel family, Canada’s first monster truck promoters. Superfoot, one of the trucks on display, is widely regarded as Canada’s first monster truck, as well. It did not originally sit on the massive tires on which it is perched now, but ran ’66s, was originally painted in a slick-looking black colour, and looked absolutely fabulous. Additionally, the very first monster truck show I ever went to in 1987, I believe, was a small, arena, three-clunker car crush put on by the Arels near my home town, featuring Superfoot (then called “Suberfoot”) and a handful of their other homebuilt monsters.

(editor’s note: Superfoot, with the 12.5ft tall tires that are on it is technically the world’s largest monster truck, currently it is inoperable)

Anyways, the trucks pictured in the link below are just a small sampling of the trucks that the Arels have owned in their near 30-something years of operation. They bought, and later sold, the original Weapon 1 from Jerry Richmond (but they still own the rights to the Weapon 1 name), the original Hammer Time, and, as you can see, the Son of Goliath and Top Gun tanks. All of the trucks now sitting at the restaurant are in pretty poor shape, but most are candidates for restoration.

Cheers,
Glen

Click here to see an awesome Canadian monster truck graveyard!