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Alan Tura of Southington earns industry’s top honor Monster Truck Man
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
Alan Tura stood in the dirt on the floor of Covelli Centre, surrounded by monster trucks and a giant tank-like dinosaur vehicle called Megasaurus that breathes fire and mangles cars.
He was right at home.
The Warren native and Southington resident is one of the founding fathers of the monster truck industry, and has earned a reputation as an innovator.
He has also been a designer, builder and driver. For all these reasons, he was inducted into the International Monster Truck Hall of Fame in Indiana in a November ceremony.
Tura was at Covelli Centre last weekend, where he was working with the Toughest Monster Truck tour while it was in town. He drives Megasaurus, which he also created.
HOW IT STARTED
Tura got started in the monster truck industry in the early 1980s, while he was working with a truck-pull crew. “I saw Bigfoot in 1983 and I got the bug,” he said.
He immediately set about to build his own monster truck, which he called Goliath. These were the early days of the industry, and there were only a half-dozen or so such trucks in the world. Now there are thousands.
“Everything blossomed from Goliath,” he said, referring to his career. An updated version of Goliath is still on the monster truck scene, and Tura’s personal pickup truck bears the vanity plate GOLIATH.
The Monster Truck Hall of Fame was started in 2010, and has 22 inductees (Tura was No. 21). It is located inside the Kruse Car Museum in Auburn, Ind. Visitors will see the original Goliath truck, a plaque honoring Tura, and photographs of his work.
“I was the sixth or seventh person in the world to start building monster trucks,” said Tura. “I probably should have been inducted in the first class.”
He certainly paid his dues.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
After building Goliath, Tura traveled the circuit, living on the road in a camper for more than 20 years. He retired as a touring monster truck driver in 2005.
In 1989, he built Son of Goliath, utilizing the tracks from an old Army tank. Then came Goliath’s Revenge in the 1990s.
In 1998, he was the first to install a jet engine in a vehicle, which he called G Force. He also created the TranStormer robot vehicle in the 1990s, and toured the world with it.
He still tours on a reduced schedule, with TranStormer and Megasaurus, as part of the Toughest Monster Truck show.
Tura is a pioneer of the monster truck industry, and was the first to create:
A vehicle with tank tracks.
A truck with two engines.
A vehicle with a jet engine.
He also took the lead in installing remote-controlled shut-off mechanisms in monster truck vehicles to improve safety.
Over the years, Tura has been featured on ESPN, MTV and the Nashville Network, and in 10 off-road magazines.
Amazingly, he has no other formal training other than a degree from Harding High School.
“It’s all hands-on training,” he said. “I’ve always been the kind of person who can look at something and figure how it works, and then design and build one from my imagination.”
HIS OTHER CLAIM TO FAME
Monster trucks aren’t the only thing that Tura does.
He also owns and operates Fear Forest, a Halloween attraction in Lordstown; stages massive fireworks shows in the Valley as a pyrotechnics expert; and built the holiday lights display that was once an annual Christmas season event at the Canfield Fairgrounds.
But his latest claim to the fame is the Vortex Tunnel.
It’s a spinning tube that can be big enough for a vehicle to drive through, and it creates a feeling of vertigo in those who go through it.
Tura created it for Fear Forest about a half-dozen years ago, and has since sold more than 700 worldwide.
The Vortex Tunnels, by the way, are manufactured at Custom Metalworks in Austintown.
“I have sold them to just about every Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, Sea World, Six Flags amusement parks, Universal Studios in Florida, and more than 600 haunted houses in North America, plus about 100 more in other countries,” he said. “I just sold one to Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh.
“I also make other Halloween haunted attractions, but the Vortex is my golden egg.”