Seemingly coming out of nowhere, Canadian Cam McQueen burst onto the Monster Jam scene in 2008 driving the truck baring his friend Travis Pastrana’s name. After performing in his first Monster Jam NGK Spark Plugs World Finals last March in Las Vegas McQueen went on to participate in the June portion of this year’s Monster Jam World Tour and showed he’s here to stay with a series of excellent Euro runs.
I sat down with McQueen to find out about his background, and how he ended up roaring into the Monster Jam business this year. “I’m originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada,” McQueen introduced himself. “I spent most of my life in British Columbia, Canada. Grew up there riding dirt bikes, riding quads, driving trucks, racing tough trucks, just whatever I could get my hands on. Building and working on vehicles, whatever it took to keep me happy.” And how did this path lead him into Monster Jam? “A friend of ours, someone we all know, Travis Pastrana, I worked with him for a couple of years working on his bikes,” McQueen continued. “ I was doing the gig with him and then they built a truck for him so he asked me to drive it a few years back. I went out and tested it and everything went good. From there we had to take a bit of a break. I had to go back to Canada and take care of some business. Then this past January they phoned me and asked me if I wanted to come out and try driving again for a couple of Canadian shows. So I went and did three shows up in Canada: Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary, and I did real well. Then they asked me to drive the truck in the World Finals, and I’ve just kept on going from there.”
That berth in Monster Jam’s biggest event was a moment McQueen truly relishes. “It was amazing. I had been a fan at World Finals for years and dreaming about Monster Trucks since I was four or five years old so just to get close enough to a Monster Truck to touch it, and then to get inside of it, let alone drive it, was amazing enough,” McQueen recalled. “Then to be asked to World Finals, I mean that was an honor. Going in there with guys who have been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. I knew a few of the guys from different shows I had done, but there I got to know a lot more of the guys and got to know them better. They are such a great group of guys and they were very accepting of me. I kind of got a foot in the door early and I definitely haven’t paid my dues compared to a lot of the guys out here, actually most of the guys out here. But they’ve all been real accepting and willing to help out and give me pointers and just help me out with whatever I needed. That was a pretty cool experience.”
McQueen said that as a new driver on the sport’s biggest circuit he has benefitted from several people who have gone out of their way to help bring him up to speed quickly. “Absolutely,” is how he answered when I asked if he had gotten lots of pointers from those already in the sport . “The first three shows that I ever did in Canada at the start of this year were in Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton, and I was on the road with my Crew Chief Becky McDonough, who is amazing. I mean not only is she the hottest Crew Chief on the circuit but she really knows her stuff. So she knows the truck well and she was really helpful. And Cole Venard on the crew was always helping me out too. And Chad Tingler. Amazing driver. I mean he’s been doing this for a lot of years. He drives a Grave Digger truck, which in most people’s eyes puts him in the upper echelon of the sport. You know when you get in a Digger you have to know what you are doing. And Chad definitely knows that. He knows the trucks inside and out. He’s an amazing guy and he was so awesome to help me out and get me started doing the arena shows and the smaller stuff that we did in Canada. He was more than happy to give me pointers and show me where I needed to pick up spots here and there. I actually told him after the second race that I did that he was probably telling me too much because I beat him in the racing in Edmonton.”
Clearly McQueen thinks the world of McDonough, his Crew Chief, and is proud of what she has done in just a few years underneath Monster Jam machines. “ She’s definitely a forerunner in this sport being a female mechanic,” McQueen gushed. “She’s done her time, she’s done her schooling, now she’s just getting dirty, hands on. She’s done an awesome job. She’s still very accepting to learn new things, much like myself, she’s more than happy to take advice from the other mechanics who’ve been out here wrenching on these trucks for decades. She’s relatively new to the sport and to mechanics, but she just goes out there and takes on whatever the challenge is. I’ve come in from a run breaking a lot of parts and being hard on the truck, and I’ll get out and go take a drink of water and by the time I get back she’s got the thing torn apart, and she’s in there getting dirty and putting the thing back together getting ready for my next run. It’s amazing. She’s a great girl. She’s been real nice to me and more than willing to help out and give me some pointers. She’s not afraid to speak her mind. I mean she’s out there dealing with 20 other guys who are harder on her than most and she just does an awesome job. She turns the other cheek, gets down to it and gets her job done which is amazing.”
Getting as much advice as possible from his crew and other drivers has been huge for this new Monster Jam star, who says it’s tougher to move up the ladder quickly in Monster Jam than most other motorsports because there is not any opportunity to practice and learn the business before show time. “That was one of the things that I realized going into my first show. I mean they called me for my first show and I had about 48 hours to finish what I was doing at my job and get packed and fly a thousand miles to my first event and hop in a truck. And when that light went green I had to go. There’s no such thing as practice in Monster Truckin’,” McQueen told me. “It’s the weirdest thing because it would be like playing field hockey all your life and getting thrown into a UFC fight. You have no chance to practice, no chance to train, no chance to get used to the sport, to get used to other competitors. And how the truck works. It’s different every time. I think you could probably ask a lot of the experienced drivers and they would say the same thing, that every time you get in the truck something’s different. You might hit the cars a little different, the cars might crush a little differently, the way the truck reacts differently to different dirt. You just can’t train for that. So the only seat time you get in this sport is competition. There’s no practice. You get in there and you go. When that green light goes it’s game on.”
As noted earlier McQueen has a very high opinion of Tingler, as do most in the Monster Jam industry, so he really enjoyed the memorable freestyle Chad turned in driving Monster Mutt Dalmatian to start the freestyle competition at this year’s NGK Spark Plugs World Finals. McQueen actually may have had the best seat in the house for Tingler’s spectacular freestyle in Las Vegas: “I was strapped in, but he was first in the order and I was second, so I was sitting in the 199 truck and staging in the tunnel at Thunder Alley,” Cam remembered. “So I got a firsthand view at his run. He went out there and nailed everything. Probably the most amazing thing of his run was after hitting the bread truck and going straight up in the air and managing to come back down on four wheels and drive away he came around and hit the triple bus stack, which nobody even knew if it was a triple yet. He was heading straight at me head to head and he launched that thing and I don’t even thing the suspension compressed, he landed so smooth. It was perfect.”
It has been a meteoric rise for Cam McQueen in 2008, making his debut in January, competing in his first World Finals in March, and battling in Monster Jam Europe in June. And if he has his way this is only the beginning. McQueen wants to be racing and freestyling Monster Jam machines for years and years to come. “I sure hope so,” McQueen admitted. “Like I said, it has been a lifelong dream for me, and now that I’m livin’ the dream, it’s been an awesome ride so far and I just hope to keep on truckin’. If they’ll keep me in the seat I’ll be more than happy to keep running and be out there with the best of ‘em for years to come.”
