I’m heading out on the road this week (to attend and report on … what else??!!! … a trucking conference!) so I thought I’d pare things down today with a few videos.
One of the things that endlessly fascinates me about trucking is how different yet similar the many different trucking cultures are around the world.
Take the Czech Republic, for example (the western half of what was once Czechoslovakia … Slovakia, like the Czech Republic, is its own country now).
They’ve got their own version of the Mid America Truck Show – appropriately called Czech Truckfest. I don’t know any more than that the “Truckfest” features drag races between bobtail tractors and a “parade of lights” of sorts. You can see some of parade below, shot by a crew from SCS Software; a German company that, believe it or not, builds truck simulators for training drivers along with trucking video games as well.
Then there’s actual “truck racing,” for lack of a better term, with obviously modified trucks racing each other on tracks one nominally sees reserved for sleek road-hugging Formula One race cars. Below is a clip from the Czech Truck Prix of 2009. All the commentary is in (what else?) Czech, yet just watch some of these scenes – especially the “driver view” camera shots. One must possess nerves of steel to pilot these big rigs at high speeds around narrow tracks like this!
Just goes to show that every nation, it seems, puts its own unique stamp on the commercial trucking industry within its borders.