“I was going to be a schoolteacher,” he said. At that time, he still hoped to get a job in the straight world. A few years later, he joined the crew of a Michigan-based monster truck called the Avenger as a mechanic. Krmel started on a go-cart at age fifteen, then did a little stock car racing.
“I come from a motor sports background,” Krmel said, explaining that his dad raced hydroplanes and that he grew up in a part of Detroit where dragsters, go-carts, and dirt bikes were all the rage. The former he honed over years on the race track. Such high-stamina maneuvers require self-discipline and derring-do. Krmel’s most gut-curdling, hair-raising, heart-stopping trick - the sky wheely - requires him to ram into a crushed car, slam his foot on the throttle, and propel the truck up on its tail. He’s scaled rows of cars, vans, buses, and giant dirt obstacles. He’s been known to jump distances of 100 to 125 feet, and to get a truck up to thirty feet off the ground. He can spin doughnuts, kicking up clouds of dust that would blind anyone within a ten-foot radius. He can do slap wheelies by jumping over an obstacle at high speed and using the bounce to send his truck vertical, standing on two wheels.
#Monster truck jam oakland driver#
At 31 years old, Krmel (pronounced Kremmel) is a big-league monster-truck driver with five consecutive world finals under his belt and eight years spent behind the wheels of a 10,000-pound vehicle. Before Donkey Kong, he manhandled a rig called Hot Wheels, and before that he drove Del Scorcho. Before Frank Krmel seized the wheel of Blue Thunder, he drove a different 1,500-horsepower truck called Donkey Kong.
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