Bigfoot #5 With Regular-Sized Tires Is Quite a Silly Sight

When it does, it changes its world-famous shoes for regular-sized ones – and the sight is perhaps the most ridiculous thing you’ve seen this week.

Available below are two very recent videos of Number 5 getting ready to hit the road (hat tip to The Drive). They show the kind of effort that goes into moving the biggest, tallest and heaviest monster truck in the world (as of 2002 until now, officially certified by the Guinness Book of World Records) when it’s not moving under its own power.

Bigfoot #5 rides on 10-feet (3-meter) tall Firestone Tundra taken off a military train that was used by the U.S. in Alaska, back in the ‘50s. The tires alone weigh about 1 ton, so you can imagine that changing one isn’t a matter of using a jack and your own skill.

In order to haul Bigfoot around the country, driving it up on a trailer is not a possibility, so there’s an entire crew and at least two pieces of heavy machinery at work to strip off the massive tires and replace them with regular-sized ones. The resulting vehicle is then driven onto the trailer, with the Firestone tires attached right next to it.

Bigfoot #5 was created in 1986 but only made it into Guinness in 2002. It is considered the one vehicle that paved the way for a popular American tradition, that of monster trucks, and spawned several other iterations (there are more Bigfoots out there) so it’s iconic in its own right, even without the Guinness certification.

Seeing it without its trademark giant tires is akin to seeing Marilyn Manson on a grocery run, without his makeup and his goth, designer clothes. You can tell it’s him, you feel like laughing but know it would be rude to do so.