Sisters Courtney and Candice Jolly returned to their native southwest Florida to compete in Monster Jam events at the Florida Sports Park the last weekend of April with huge crowds of adoring fans on hand and the young drivers did not disappoint, winning several events against a star-studded line-up of Monster Jam veterans.

The site for the annual events in the Gulf Coast city is a spacious dirt facility that is intentionally flooded in the winter for the popular swamp buggy races. In the spring however the layout lends itself to outstanding monster action due to the long front stretch that makes for a very fast straight-line racecourse, and lots of room for freestyle thrills. With an eight truck line-up that included World Finals veterans Randy Brown in Grave Digger, Scott Hartsock in Gunslinger, and Frank Krmel in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, along with Courtney Jolly (who made her World Finals debut this year) driving her Pastrana 199 Ford and Candice Jolly in the new Monster Mutt Dalmatian, record setting crowds of Monster Jam fans packed into the venue for all three scheduled events.

The Jolly sisters established the tone for the weekend Friday night when Courtney won the weekend’s first battle, the wheelie competition, and Candice blasted through the racing bracket for the overall race victory. The Florida girls then finished off the opening night sweep when the crowd selected Courtney as the freestyle winner over Brown after the judges scored Pastrana 199 and Grave Digger each with a top score of 27 points.

For Candice, still a rookie, the Friday night race win was the highlight of her weekend. She remained extremely competitive the rest of the weekend even though she did not add to her win total. As for her younger sister, Courtney was a player for victories all weekend long getting the best of the wheelie competition and adding another freestyle win, this one outright, to her total when she took the final event Sunday afternoon.

The racecourse was an old school layout, the type that started being used at outdoor racetracks as monster trucks began to get faster and fly farther. Coming off the starting line the trucks went over a roller hill with two cars imbedded in it, then hit the throttle hard the remainder of the flat front stretch before flying over the main set of crush cars to the finish line. Candice’s crew chief, Ben “Bobo” Winslow, set the Mutt up perfectly and she responded. It’s become evident very quickly in her career that Candice rarely gets beat off of the starting line. She cuts extremely quick lights and normally has an advantage at the beginning of each race. That was especially apparent Friday night when she roared into the championship race to take on Grave Digger. Mutt got the hole shot over Digger, and as soon as she cleared the starting line roller she put the hammer down. Winslow gave her a rocket ship to drive and she exploded across the finish line to the popular victory, her first ever in a finale over Grave Digger. As you would expect Candice was ecstatic, and those emotions bubbled over when I interviewed her in front of the cheering crowd. She may be new to the sport but already she has become one of the most entertaining interviews on the circuit, and her hometown crowd really appreciated that enthusiastic personality coming out. Candice is among those scheduled to be a part of this year’s European tour and I expect she will be a huge star with our overseas fans.

While Candice is coming on her sister has the edge in experience, having started in this sport almost a year earlier, and Courtney is beginning to make an impact everywhere she goes. After making a much better showing then skeptics expected from her at the Monster Jam World Finals, she returned to her home town track with huge confidence and now seems to have meshed with her crew, led by Dennis “Bucky” Foltz and Becky McDonough. Her Saturday night freestyle was another wild one despite losing that round to Grave Digger, but the truck returned to the pits with some substantial damage. The team got to work though and had Pastrana 199 back to 100% for the Sunday afternoon finale.

Courtney is obviously a quick learner. She struggled early this season in freestyles on the stadium courses, partially because she is so aggressive and often got in trouble early in her runs, several times flipping the Pastrana 199 truck with way too much time left on the clock. In Naples she was still aggressive, but kept enough control to fill the clock each time while still going big, which made her very tough to beat in her hometown. Just ask Brown, who had to go ballistic with a classic Grave Digger “over the edge” performance to beat Courtney in Saturday night’s freestyle competition that absolutely thrilled that standing room only crowd. In the wheelie competition Courtney’s team had the truck set perfectly and the unique track for that battle, which included a wheelie bump at the far end of the track designed for slap wheelies, then finished on the crush cars with a sky wheelie, was suited to her very well. With the exception of one slap wheelie that Randy Moore nailed in War Wizard that lasted almost the entire straightaway and had the crowd gasping in amazement, it was Courtney Jolly and Pastrana 199 consistently hitting the most impressive wheelies of the weekend, and again, let me point out that she was doing this against a field full of some of the sport’s most accomplished veterans. Like her sister, her enthusiastic interviews to the live crowd were also extremely well received.

It was a very busy weekend for the Jolly’s, with tons of local media attention and lots of obligations to fulfill with family and friends. A lot was expected from them and they both delivered consistently strong performances all weekend long. While they are still very new to the sport Courtney and Candice Jolly showed their hometown fans that they’ve come a long way in a short period of time, and it looks like they intend to make their mark in Monster Jam for a long time to come.