Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/305892
DIVERSIONS 46 | Overdrive | May 2014 S tunt driver and Class 8 racer Mike Ryan wants you to be a Champ. In 2015, Ryan and John Condren of the Champ- Car World Series, among others, will launch the ChampTruck World Series Class 8 race series with a debut event at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky., Ryan and company showed the 2006 Freight- liner Columbia (pictured) he and his team put together to show potential new "Champs" – drivers in the series – how they can get into a race truck affordably. They've inked a partnership with Daimler's SelecTrucks used-truck dealerships to help new racers get into the business of speed. Other sponsors also are in the works to help fi nance the minimal extra required equipment. Ryan and Condren explain things in a video you can fi nd at Overdrive- Online.com; search "ChampTruck No. 1." They'd like to build a Class 8 racing culture in the United States to match its popularity in Europe. Also there, catch photos of Ryan's heavily modifi ed Freightliner on the Pike's Peak Hill Climb in the gallery below the video. ChampTruck series getting off the ground ChampTruck's Mike Ryan (left) and John Condren Todd Dills VIDEO: MIKE RYAN JUMPS HIS STUNT FREIGHTLINER "Size Matters 2," shot at a port terminal in Long Beach, Calif., shows spectacular stunts and precision han- dling, culminating with a Freightliner jumping a line of automobiles. Search the title of this sidebar at Over- driveOnline.com to view the video, or scan this code to pull it up on your mobile device. By Todd Dills By the end of onetime truck driver Dave New- man's second novel, the book's protagonist and nar- rator, Dan Charles, comes to something of an under- whelming conclusion. This follows a DUI piloting a four-wheeler that ends his brief trucking career: "A job awaited some- where, one worse than trucking, one where I would have to wear a hardhat and leather gloves and steel-toed boots and I would still end up bruised and burned and dumb, and I was willing to work that until my fi ngers fell off, until I lost my hand." Underwhelming only on its face, though, as it might encapsulate the entirety of "Two Small Birds" better than any other passage or high-drama moment – and there are plenty of both. Bar fi ghts, encounters with "commercial company" and wandering travelers, New novel chronicles trucker's failure By Todd Dills Diversions_0514.indd 46 5/1/14 10:01 AM