I found some vintage Monster Truck competition footage that made my jaw drop. From what I can gather, the US Hot Rod Association was the sanctioning body in a monster truck racing series in the late 80’s. Two trucks would race head to head around identical course that included sharp turns and cars to crush. The craziest part was that there were a plethora of tracked vehicles that competed with the 4 wheeled traditional trucks. Here’s a compilation of some of the more famous ones:

It looks like they hardly have any suspension travel which means they probably broke a lot and sucked to drive. The cool thing is that a modern day company called Howe & Howe Tech have built a tank called the Ripsaw that solves many of the shortcomings of the monster tanks of the late 80’s. They were featured on the cover of Popular Science a few years ago and they had a show that ran on the Discovery Channel for a couple of seasons. The Ripsaw is able to achieve over 70mph over rough terrain. Howe & Howe Tech were able to keep the tank light using a tube frame and their own track system design. The actual tracks themselves are lighter because they don’t use pivot bushings and they were able to give the Ripsaw long suspension travel using a proprietary track tension system that keeps the track on the guides while they’re moving through a long range of motion. This is footage of them testing a 1000 horsepower version of the Ripsaw they built for GI Joe: Retaliation.

The Howe brothers weren’t able to say what movie it was for on their show, but you can see the Ripsaw at the end of this trailer:

Sources: YouTube user DiggerFanJSB, Discovery Channel and Machinima