In the world of Monster Jam Carl Van Horn has been an enigma. A driver of obvious talent, a hard working mechanic with a great understanding of truck set-ups, someone any team would love to have on board. At the same time Van Horn can’t seem to find the right seat, jumping from team to team several times in recent years, always finding at least some on track success, but never the off-track happiness he’s been searching for, a perfect balance between Monster Jam and family life that is important to him. In 2008, popular CVH hopes that has all changed with his move to Steve Sims’ team where he takes the wheel of the legendary Mopar Magic truck.

Let’s try a trivia question here: how many trucks can you name that Carl Van Horn has driven in Monster Jam competition? We’ll try to answer that at the end of this column.

Getting back to Van Horn’s recent move to Sims’ operation, Carl thinks that after years of searching for the perfect situation, he has finally found it. “It is. You know with Steve living right there in Virginia Beach, the shop’s not far from home. Every time he’s in the shop I can go home, when there’s not a race going on I can work at the stone company, so it’s an awesome deal,” Van Horn explained.” Steve Sims is one of the best guys out there. (Crew Chief) Tommy Powers is keeping the truck right. Coming out for the first time in the truck and winning the first race, I can’t explain how good that felt. And then to get to the finals again on the second night and only lose by a tenth of a second is a great start.” Van Horn’s references to winning races right off the bat reflects his success last month driving Mopar Magic in Naples, FL.

Van Horn went on to tell me that it’s not just that the Sims offer of a job on and off the track close to home is exactly what he was looking for, it’s also that Steve Sims entered the Monster Jam world a few years ago intent on building a team the right way, putting together the best equipment and the best personnel. “That’s right. He got Tommy Powers on his side and asked him what he needed to do to do this right,” Van Horn continued. “He asked Dennis Anderson. He’s good friends with him. He did it right, right out of the gate. He doesn’t mind running the trucks hard. He doesn’t tell me to hold back on anything. Just go out there and have fun and give the fans a show. ‘Race it hard and do what you want to do’ is what he tells me.” For Sims adding a talent like Van Horn to his team makes sense. He gets a winner, someone who will keep Mopar Magic competitive week in and week out. And his own Stone Crusher ride benefits as well, adding an expert on tracks and truck set-ups like Van Horn to Powers, one of the most respected Crew Chiefs in the sport.

For Van Horn this opportunity is a dream come true. He’s had great rides and equipment before, including a stint as a Team Grave Digger driver. But until now he’s never had a situation where he could compete for a top level Monster Jam team without sacrificing more time away from his family than he is willing to: “Exactly. And that’s what a lot of my changes have been about,” Van Horn said. “Trying to figure out how to do this and still stay a big part of my family and my kids. It’s been tough but this is the best deal I’ve ever found and I don’t picture me going anywhere else.”

Carl says it is the combination of being close to home, having a job during the week that then lets him do his Monster Jam thing on the weekend, and knowing that he is a part of a team determined to compete at the sport’s highest level that makes this the ideal team for him to be a part of. As soon as the agreement between them was made for him to join Sims’ team, and after Mopar Magic legend Gary Wiggins had to step aside from driving for a while, Sims told Van Horn to get in the truck and let him know anything that he wants to make the piece as good as Carl can make it. “Oh yeah. He said take this truck and feel it out and tell me if there is anything different that you want to do,” Van Horn related. “I’ve changed the set-up a little bit, the ride height of the shocks, so far that’s all I’ve done. I love the way the truck works right now. I’ve gotta get used to it in freestyle though, it’s a little bit different that the last truck I was in, I had the wheel base a little bit longer there so I could get big air and not have to worry about jumping with the nose high in the air. So I’ve got to get used to that difference, but man, it’s awesome.”

And for someone who has loved Monster Jam long before he ever got inside a truck, getting to drive Mopar Magic, a name with more than two decades of Monster Jam history, is special. “Oh yeah. He (Gary Wiggins) started in the early ‘80’s when I was a teenager,” Van Horn recalls. “I remember Gary; he always ran hard and did an awesome job. So they are big shoes to fill, and I’m doing my best to fill ‘em, but it’s going to be hard.” Not only to fill Wiggins legendary shoes, but to try and create even more Mopar Magic history, and to hopefully earn a berth for Mopar Magic next year at the 10th edition of the Monster Jam NGK Spark Plugs World Finals in Las Vegas. “That is our goal right there,” Van Horn admits. “You know if we could get both of these trucks into the World Finals, especially since Mopar has never been, that would be awesome. I wouldn’t even care if Steve drove it, just to see the name there would be awesome.”

Steve Sims has been building his name as a driver the past few years in Stone Crusher and he impressed everyone with his performance at this year’s World Finals, his first driving experience in Las Vegas. Sims is doing a great job of balancing driver and owner duties, taking pride in his own performance while making sure both of his team trucks have the best of everything. So it makes perfect sense to bring Carl Van Horn on to his team, and he says so far, he could not have hoped for the arrangement to be working out any better. “No doubt. He (Van Horn) seems really happy,” Sims stated. “I haven’t known Carl for a very long time. I never saw him when he was in Digger. The first time I saw him he was in T-Maxx. But he seems happy, his family seems happy. It wasn’t a money issue with him, it was ‘I want to be close to home, I want a job, and to race on the side, and to have fun with racing, not letting these monsters be like a job.’ Well I don’t want it to be a job either. I’m out here to have fun. We love to win, but if we lose we still have fun. We please the fans and we go home. That’s all we care about and that’s what I’ve told all of my drivers. I never want my trucks to get booed. That’s all I want. If you win, great. We’ll go out and have a drink afterwards. But don’t get the truck booed. Just go out there and have fun with it.” It’s an attitude that has been successful right out of the box, and has seen Sims’ team rise to prominence as fast as any start-up team ever has in this difficult business to get into.

For Carl Van Horn, he hopes that after years of searching for the Monster Jam situation that is “the one” for him, both professionally and personally, he has finally found it as the new driver of Mopar Magic.

Back to the trivia question. How many trucks can you name that Carl Van Horn has driven in Monster Jam competition? Here’s my answer, hoping that I’m not forgetting any: Spiderman, Firemouth, Karl Malone’s Power Forward, Grave Digger, Pure Adrenalin, T-Maxx, and Mopar Magic. Am I forgetting any? One thing is for sure: Carl Van Horn hopes that if we add any more names to that list it’s only because his team owner Steve Sims has decided to put him in another piece on that same team. Van Horn may have just finally found his permanent Monster Jam home.