A look at the won-loss record in racing on Speed Channel televised events for this season shows that Meents has raced 14 times in head to head competition. He has won each and every one of those 14 races, and claimed the event racing victory in Minneapolis, New Orleans, Tampa, and St. Louis. Four trips to the Speed Channel stage is indeed impressive, and the unblemished record in every round of racing speaks for itself. But Tom has been entered in a total of seven major stadium and dome events this season, so the math looks a little strange here, doesn’t it? How can he be undefeated when he has not won the racing at three of the events he was entered? That’s the famine part of the story. One of the strangest parts of this unpredictable USHRA season has been the freak incidents that have, on three occasions already this year, kept Maximum Destruction out of the racing competition completely.

In Atlanta there was a wheel ripping off of the truck during introductions, and at Indianapolis he flipped and crashed the truck during the intros. Then in Houston another rare occurrence, something fans almost never see from a Meents truck: engine failure. Three-quarters of the way through his qualification run in Reliant Stadium the engine blew in Maximum Destruction, ending his night again before it ever started. You can tell that for Meents and the Max-D crew it’s now becoming a sigh of relief when Meents pulls to the line for a race in the first round. The way things have been going this year if they can keep things together and get the truck to the line to go racing, then the battle, at least so far this year, is won. If he takes the green in an actual race Meents has been awesome. His most recent racing triumph in St. Louis was one of his most impressive of the year since Dennis Anderson in Grave Digger had the fastest qualifying time and was clocking faster times in the preliminary rounds. But when the two biggest individual rivals in motorsports squared off in the finale at the Edward Jones Dome it was Meents who got faster, and it was the reigning racing World Champion Anderson who struggled as Maximum Destruction took home the big trophy in front of another sold-out crowd.

In freestyle the results have been similar. Tony Farrell and Blue Thunder topped Meents and the all-star line-up last fall in Minneapolis, but then Meents reeled off consecutive freestyle wins in Atlanta (after repairing the wheel that was torn off the truck before racing), New Orleans, and Tampa. In Indianapolis he repaired his truck in time to freestyle, but fell one point shy of the winning score posted by Randy Brown in his Grave Digger. In Houston, though, the blown engine could not be changed in time to freestyle, and he was forced to sit that one out. Well, actually, he did not spend much time sitting around even after his mechanical meltdown in the Lone Star state. Meents and his crew showed that while they want to beat Anderson and Grave Digger more than anybody, they also have total respect for the icon and appreciation for what he means to the fans and to the sport. With Maximum Destruction out of the competition and Grave Digger in trouble as the persistent problem they had been having with planetaries on the truck again reared its ugly head, Meents and his crew joined the Digger team in a frantic thrash that paid off when the Grave Digger was fixed just in time for freestyle, an event that Anderson was brilliant in and won easily with Meents leading the cheers for his rival. I think the way Tom sees it he really doesn’t want anyone to beat Anderson that isn’t named Tom Meents (except maybe his teammates Phil Foster and Guy Wood). You see so many rivals who don’t feel that way. Living in the hotbed for college basketball that is Louisville, KY, there are no more hated rivals than fans of the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky. And most of the fans I know who cheer for Louisville have two teams they root for: their beloved Cardinals and whoever is playing against Kentucky. Most UK fans that I know are the same way. Sometimes I think they root almost as hard for whoever is playing against U of L as they do for the Wildcats. Meents isn’t that way. It seems that Meents’ approach is that if he and Maximum Destruction can’t win, then he wants to see Anderson take Grave Digger to the winner’s stage.

When the pair came to St. Louis it was really interesting to see how the freestyle would play out. USHRA officials this year have been using the scores from the previous week between the two to determine who takes to the track last in freestyle, considered by many to be an advantage. For the first time in quite a while it was Anderson getting to go last coming off of his Houston win. So Maximum Destruction came onto the track with Anderson watching every second of Meents’ brilliant run. I want to look at the tape of the run again as soon as I get the chance, but my feeling at the event was that the performance in St. Louis was one of the best ever from Meents, and that is saying a whole lot. Anderson agreed and took the track knowing it was going to be almost impossible to beat Meents on that night. Grave Digger put on an awesome show, but fell one point short and Anderson congratulated the judges for their scoring, agreeing that Maximum Destruction was the winner that night in St. Louis. The love-hate relationship between the sport’s biggest stars is amazing to watch. The intense lengths that both of them will go to on the track to beat the other, yet off the track the incredible mutual respect that exists between the two. It’s a respect that has grown out of years of doing everything that they could to beat the other. It’s also a respect that has taken a lot of time to develop. The no-love-lost between the two days really do still exist on the track. It’s when Tom Meents and Dennis Anderson aren’t sitting behind the wheels of their popular monster trucks that the attitudes have changed.

A final thought for this week. It will be tougher than ever for it to happen, with more trucks in the field than ever before, and the strongest line-up of trucks in history slated for the World Finals in Las Vegas. But wouldn’t it be something if this year, for the first time in World Finals history, the most intense rivals in the history of the sport, Dennis Anderson and Tom Meents, a pair of legendary drivers with four racing World Championships between them (and a total of 8 world titles overall between them) were to meet in the final race for the World Title? I know it’s a dream match-up many Monster Jam fans are hoping for as they journey to Las Vegas next month.