The life of a truck driver may not be the most glamorous, with long hours behind the wheel, fights at truck stops, and spending nights parked on a highway access ramp, but his otherwise monotonous and monotonous, has been exalted above others. similar occupations. Truckers have their own show on the Discovery Channel, Ice Road Truckers, a fashion statement in the form of a trucker hat, and the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, from the Hollywood blockbuster Transformers, who takes the same form as their vehicles. Above all, they are one of the few occupations that have a professional sport based on them: truck racing.
While their interstate cousins move goods to and from large metropolitan population centers at 55 mph, truck racing drivers, on the other hand, aren’t faced with a hitched-up trailer, but instead compete with just their cab, which supposedly can beat a Porsche 911 at 100 mph Truck racing began and remains the largest in Europe. As truckers in Europe have a more relaxed work environment than their overworked and overfed American counterparts, European truckers in their spare time would meet each other during delivery, unhook their cargo, rush their cabs, pick it up from again and continued to deliver their cargo.
Today, the sport is sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the same international body that sanctions Formula 1. Race trucks often exceed 1,200 horsepower and 6,000 pound-feet. of torque. Technology was making them so fast and powerful that a speed limit of 100 mph was imposed due to their tremendous weight and strength. While defined as a “no-contact” sport, it’s not uncommon for these road leviathans to brush and bump into each other while on the track. The two largest truck series today are the FIA European Truck Racing Championship and the British Truck Racing Association.
Truck racing has become a competitive professional sport. Participants are no longer there to mix business with pleasure, as they head to deliver a trailer full of diapers to the local Wal-Mart, but rather for the thrill and challenge of racing the biggest machines on the road, or “driving a apartment”. block from the sixth floor,” as one driver described it.
