Waving the Green Flag

We’re going racing, folks. In March, the Super Truck Racing Association of North America-a sanctioning body looking to launch a heavy-truck racing series-signed a title sponsor: transmission maker ZF Group. The “ZF Championship Racing Series” is expected to launch next year.

Truth be told, big, loud, roarin’ rigs have been moving at serious speed around ovals in Western Canada and the U.S. Northwest for the past few years. There’s a core of racers in Calgary, guys like Ron Singer and Al McMeckan, who fielded a dozen or so trucks in last year’s eight-race North American Big Rig Racing Series. They were at tracks like Race City Speedway in Calgary, Saratoga Raceway in Campbell River, B.C., and Western Speedway in Victoria, plus four tracks in Washington.

As Singer tells it, they sold out every time. Singer is president of Ron Singer Truck Lines, a past president of the Alberta Construction Trucking Association, and past director for the Canadian Dump Truck Federation. He fields two trucks in the series, one of which won the 2000 championship, driven by Cory Riplinger. I hope to see one or two of those races this year.

But the STRANA/ZF series will be a different kettle of fish. It’s unfair to compare them, even inappropriate, but I’d better make a couple of basic distinctions.

Our homegrown racing trucks are modified class-8 highway tractors, most of them running Detroit Diesel engines pushing about 600 horsepower to the wheels. They race on short-track ovals. Built like the European Super Truck machines that inspired this new series, the STRANA racers, on the other hand, will develop more than twice that much power and accelerate faster than a Porsche turbo. They’ll be pure racing trucks: under their skin you’ll see tube frames, sequential transmissions, wild braking systems, and telemetry that rivals what you see in Formula One. In Europe, they race on road courses that might otherwise be hosting F1 races, tracks like Jarama in Spain and the Nurburgring in Germany.

The biggest difference between the racing circuits may well be in sponsorship. Whereas our Western racers enjoy sponsorship from the likes of Foothill Equipment Sales, STRANA teams will, I hope, attract other major outfits like the ZF Group. Local versus international, little versus very big. That’s why I say it’s unfair to compare.

ZF-half of the ZF Meritor transmission partnership on this side of the Atlantic-is a German company with a long tradition in racing. There was a time when most F1 cars ran ZF transmissions. A.J. Foyt won the Indy 500 some years back with a ZF gearbox. It has supplied all the transmissions for the European Super Truck series for years. Motorsports is one of the company’s key proving grounds, and, with luck, other North American companies will join them in truck racing here. Across the pond there are factory teams from Mercedes Benz, MAN, and Tatra, with serious sponsorship of a private team by Caterpillar.

We need the same sort of thing, perhaps with larger carriers getting involved (a possibility that doesn’t exist in Europe, where mega-fleets like Schneider National just don’t exist). As things stand now, the STRANA series is an unwritten book. Executive director Brian Till, a former IndyCar and Toyota Atlantic driver, says the “product on the track will reflect professional teams and professional drivers.” But so far that’s just a plan, so there’s work to be done.

Among the crucial questions to be answered is this: will the ZF Championship run races as support for existing CART, NASCAR, or maybe even IRL races? Any one of those is a possibility. Or this one: will it be necessary to run on the big oval tracks to attract the crowds? Most everyone involved with STRANA has a preference for road courses-as do I-but an awful lot of North American racing fans love their ovals.

It’s different in Europe, where there aren’t many ovals and not much taste for them anyway. But the crowds sure do come. Well over 200,000 people trek to the Nurburgring every year for the premier race in the Super Trucks series, and that’s more than ever go to a Formula One race. But what happens at the ‘Ring is what I’d like to see here. That’s a race weekend, certainly, but it’s also a gigantic three-day truckers’ festival. There’s a parade of big rigs driven to the track by spectators-quite a sight, this long snaking line of highway trucks rumbling slowly around that famous track. If we could pull off something similarly joyful here, I’d be a happy guy. Let me know what you think about all this. If you want to talk directly to STRANA, go to www.stranaracing.com or phone 1-866/880-8782 toll-free. Whether you’re just a panting fan or a would-be participant, speak up.