THE MORNING AFTER HE PULLED OFF a double back flip in front of a live crowd at last month’s Malicious Monster Truck Show, Bill Payne met me at the gates with his wife Lorna before the Sunday matinee.
“It’s a very risky trick,” the monster truck driver says. “You’re in the middle of your run and, in your head, you’re thinking, ‘Do I do it now?’ But what happens if I’m only three jumps into my run and I just flipped and I break the wheels off? Then I’m done… So every jump, you’re like, ‘Ahhh, don’t break! Is this the one? Do I go now?’ Last night, I did about five, six hits, and I thought, ‘Just do it!’”
He hit the gas in the some-14,000-pound machine, hits the backflip ramp, flips the truck once, crashes down, gasses back up into a second flip and lands the thing on its wheels…
“And then we just kept going and just had another epic run afterwards,” Bill recalled the play-by-play from the night before. “I couldn’t have asked for a better free style. It’s one of those where you get emotional when you’re talking to the crowd afterwards, because I was getting just as amped up as they were.”
Bill’s been doing this for a long time.
He’s 42 years old. This March marked the start of 22 years of racing professionally. But he doesn’t just race the trucks, he fixes them after each show, hauls them from show to show and has made a living building them from the ground up at his shop Straight Up Racing in Port Orchard.
Last month’s show at the fairgrounds was only his fourth year putting on the event in his home town. It’s one of the few times where they run both the promoter side and the racing side. “This is all us, we just rent the facility,” Bill said. “We set up all the crowd fencing, the archways, the merch, we built the track, we gotta wide load the trucks around town… everything is us. We just get keys to the gate and they say, go for it.”
The hometown shows allow him to see all the people that knew him back when he was just a punk kid, driving lowriders and racing BMX, 20 or 30 years ago. He was born and raised off of Bond Road between Poulsbo and Kingston. He’s lived here his entire life. But he’s worked on the road.
He’s been touring the nation with his trucks for the better part of the last two decades.
“I went all over the country,” he said. “I was from Washington to Alabama to Montana wherever I could to try to get shows to make a name for myself… until finally we got to where we’re at now, building more trucks, building stronger trucks. Everybody loved my work ethic, so everybody wanted to hire me for that… And everybody would keep pushing me, saying, ‘If you’d get more trucks, we’d would just deal with you direct,’ because they liked my ethics. I would’ve never thought when I first started, I was eating cup of noodles, sleeping underneath the flatbed trailer, in a sleeping bag underneath the truck, you know, dodging oil leaks.”
Bill said he landed in the monster truck world through one of those right place, right time scenarios. He was 20 years old, working at the shipyard. But he couldn’t stand the shipyard life. He said it just wasn’t for him. When he decided to leave the shipyard for a career in monster trucks, his shipyard colleagues thought he was crazy. Some said he was making the biggest mistake of his life.
Now some of them come to his shows and admit they were way off.
“I was always into wheeling, but then somebody kind of gave me the opportunity to take care of his monster truck,” he said. “And, one day I’d had a bad day at work, and I was just like, ‘You know what, let’s do this.’”
The guy who had hired him to work on his truck at the time didn’t really know anything about monster trucks, he just wanted to drive one. “I didn’t know anything either,” Bill said. “It wasn’t like, you know, most of these guys that work for me it’s always been their dream. I was just a hardworking guy that said, ‘I’ll give it a shot…’ and then it became a passion and a love.”
Now, from his home base in Port Orchard, he’s built more than 20 monster trucks from scratch. He’s started selling his parts to other teams around the country. And from March to October each year, he and his wife and his team are out on the road doing shows every weekend. // BILL MAN
THE MALICIOUS MONSTER TRUCK TOUR rolls through California with stops in Burlington and Monroe, Wa. and Roseburg, Ore. this month. They’ll be back at the Kitsap Fairgrounds next summer. Find a full schedule of events and more at straightupracing.com
