Back in the 1980s, one of the most precarious looking and cool things that monster trucks did was to crush old school buses. They did not actually crush the buses but they did drive across the top of them. The video you are going to see below was shot in 1984 and while it was not the very first attempt at driving over old school buses, it is among the earliest ever recorded. The truck is Bear Foot and it is being driven by Jack Willman who went onto fame driving the Taurus monster truck and performing this same stunt at arenas and stadiums all over the country.
The devil is in the details of this one. Why? For starters, the safety gear consists of the chrome tube decorative roll bar behind the cap and the trucker hat that Willman has perched on his head as he drives. Secondly, we have never seen this attempted without a “ramp” of cars that lessened (by a large degree) the step that the truck had to make while climbing the front of the buses. After watching this you will understand why they added the cars. It was not because the truck was incapable of climbing, it was because without them carnage seemed like a guarantee. Why? Axles.
You will see Willman’s first attempt thwarted when the rear axle breaks after he mashes the throttle and the truck tries to bounce up the nose of the bus. The truck seems to frag the rear end again on the second attempt but there is a cut in the film and we see the truck driving across (and sinking into) the roofs of the two GM buses that it is squashing It had to be freaky up there for sure.
We never see Willman get down but the reality is that he had to have backed down the noses of the buses. Driving straight off the end seems suicidal and even he could not have been that crazy…maybe.
