In clouds of black diesel smoke, some controversy | When enthusiasts don’t play well with locals

We’re inside the oval at Daytona International Speedway, about to leave in our 702-horsepower Dodge Ram 1500 TRX—which would have normally been revered elsewhere but was roundly ignored inside the walls of the world’s largest truck show—when a lady in a golf cart motions for us to roll down the window.

“You’ll have to go up to that building and make a right to get out,” she says. “The normal route to the tunnel is where we had the burnout competition, and it’s sort of—messed up right now.”

Ech. Yes. That’s what happens, we suppose, when you have a couple dozen 1000-horsepower diesel pickups laying down as much rubber as they possibly can.

Photography Credits: Krookid Photography

It’s a blistering hot Saturday afternoon in Florida, where the only shade is man-made, often beneath a truck so lifted you can’t imagine how the driver gets in and out.

(Revelation: They’re call AMP steps, named after the most common manufacturer, AMP Research. They're bolted in beneath the door, out of sight. They're wired to the OBD-II system, so when you press a button at the bottom of the door, it opens, and the OBD tells the steps to descend. Close the door, and they fold back up. But on a lot of these trucks, it’s still a long way up to the AMP step. And yes, there are trucks here with rope ladders.)

Photography Credits: Krookid Photography

Daytona Truck Meet's founder and director of marketing, Jordan Muhlbauer, 31, says the event started with his simple Facebook page on cool trucks that rocketed to 10,000 likes. Then came an informal meetup on the beach, “where we were promptly told to disperse,” he says. They ended up in a nearby Burlington Coat Factory parking lot.

Then came a formal show that outgrew a couple of venues, then finally the one venue you can’t outgrow: Daytona International Speedway. Park outside and walk in, or register your truck and drive in. Over three days this June, including a Sunday that was washed out, Muhlbauer hosted about 45,000 people and 7000 registered trucks from 40 states. That’s just inside; thousands more were parked outside.

There were multiple competitions, including the obligatory bikini contest and a best-of-show judging—which was won by a kid named Cooper and his new black, mega-lifted Ford F-250 Super Duty diesel with full four-wheel steer, “just like a monster truck, which it basically was,” Muhlbauer says.

Photography Credits: Krookid Photography

Muhlbauer, also the emcee, mentioned during the trophy presentation that Cooper looked a little young to own a truck that basically cost as much as a Ferrari Portofino. “I’m 15,” Cooper said. “I just got my learner’s permit.”

To say the event was an economic success is an understatement, Muhlbauer says. “All of our apparel, anything with a logo on it, was gone by noon Saturday. Vendors were running out of gear. All the vendors were super happy and are begging to throw money at us for next year.”

It may have been hectic inside the Speedway, but outside the track it was apparently three days of pickup chaos. Residents and some city officials are questioning whether to allow the Truck Meet to continue.

From a story in the Daytona Beach News Journal: “As the smoke cleared—literally in some cases—from the traffic, noise and late-night mayhem of this past weekend’s Daytona Truck Meet, beachside residents on Monday were still recovering from an ordeal that some likened to being in a war zone.

‘“People are on edge this morning and they have been throughout this whole weekend,” said Weegie Kuendig, a longtime resident of the city’s historic Seabreeze neighborhood. “Really, my house vibrated the entire weekend, literally, until 4 and 5 o’clock in the morning. There’s something about that rumble that goes right through you,” she said. “Everybody was so tired; people couldn’t sleep.”

‘“My office parking lot was trashed,” City Commissioner Aaron Delgado, an attorney, told the newspaper. “There were tampons, condoms, beer bottles. It was gross. We filled up a couple garbage cans of trash.”

Area police departments wrote 1600 tickets and made 65 arrests, some of them felonies, which is actually down from the first year the Truck Meet was held at the Speedway, 2018, when 2150 tickets were issued.

Muhlbauer acknowledges that some of the attendees weren’t treating the public with respect, laying part of the blame on younger drivers, who often own “squats,” trucks that are raised in the front and squatting on their tires in the back. There were only a handful of squats in the infield, but they abounded on the streets of Daytona Beach. Some drivers have a hard enough time seeing over a truck hood, but with the nose of a squatter pointed at the sky, it creates a dangerous situation, Muhlbauer says.

Photography Credits: Steven Cole Smith

He plans on likely banning squatters from registering for his show next year—assuming there is one—but it won’t keep the squat owners from attending as fans.

Squats began in Central Florida, Muhlbauer says, with “kids who go deer dogging in the woods”—using dogs to chase down deer. “They get way back in the swamp and they need all the traction they can get, so they raise the front, lower the rear. The concept moved from the woods onto the road and to the custom truck world.”

In other words, Florida man.

“It’s a younger crowd, more immature,” Muhlbauer says. “They’re kind of a thorn in the side of the industry. They are often the ones doing burnouts on the street.”

But touring Daytona Beach after the Saturday show, it wasn’t just squatters that were doing burnouts, sounding air horns, blasting loud music and open exhausts, and blinding other motorists with hundred-LED bolt-on lights. How Muhlbauer is expected to control this is unclear, but it could cost him the 2022 Daytona Truck Meet, especially if the Speedway buckles to the pressure and refuses to rent him the track again.

“We bring a ton of tourism dollars to the city,” Muhlbauer says. If someone else organized it, a truck event could be entirely out of control. As it is, he gives the truckers an enclosed environment to show off. “Otherwise, it could be worse.”

Photography Credits: Krookid Photography

At the city council meeting several days later, Daytona Police Chief Jakari Young, who spent $170,000 on police overtime that weekend, said he wasn’t interested in potential changes. “I just want it gone. I think the residents want it gone. It just does not work.”

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