Bob Chandler: Full Biography
Bob Chandler is an American off-road racer and shop owner who built the first Bigfoot in 1975 and, in doing so, created the monster truck. He is in four halls of fame and led the sport’s safety body for decades.
Ferguson A former construction worker from the St. Louis area, he began racing his family’s 1974 Ford F-250 in 1975 and kept breaking it. Midwest parts shops did not stock what he needed, so he and his wife Marilyn opened their own with their friend Jim Kramer. The truck grew bigger as he tested parts on it, and it took the name Bigfoot from his heavy-footed driving.
Car Crush In 1981 he drove Bigfoot over two junk cars in a field and filmed it as a joke. A promoter saw the tape in his shop and asked him to do it in front of a crowd. He hesitated, worried about how destructive it looked, and then agreed. The first public car crush followed, the sport followed from that, and Ford backed Bigfoot from 1983 to 2005.
Safety By the mid-1980s there was a fleet of Bigfoots and a field of imitators. Chandler answered the arms race over size with Bigfoot 5 and the arms race over risk by co-founding the Monster Truck Racing Association in 1987. He taught himself computer-aided design, patented a suspension that transformed how the trucks handled, and co-invented the remote kill switch that every monster truck now carries.
