While the Scooby-Doo truck isn’t alone in familiar cartoon and comics characters that have appeared in Monster Jam over the years – a brief listing of others includes Batman, Iron Man, the Tasmanian Devil, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Wonder Woman – it is certainly one of the most recognizable out on the track, as it comes complete with large ears, an outstretched slobbery tongue, big fuzzy tail and familiar teal collar.
This has made the Great Dane-sized vehicle a fan favorite, because as driver Linsey Read pointed out in a phone interview with Dog O’Day earlier this month, everyone has seen one of the Scooby-Doo shows or movies at some point, creating an instant rapport.
Read has been driving the Scooby-Doo truck since 2016 after she made a splash while racing in a pre-show warm-up event at the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas.
When not wheeling a colossal vehicle around the track, Read can often be found wrangling the joyful chaos that comes from a household of pets, or going on adventures with her daughter, stepdaughters and sprint car racer husband.
While Monster Jam usually has the Stadium Series Red, Yellow and Green, Arena Challenges 1-4 and an international series, for 2020 and 2021 they’ve had to pare back the schedule to a single Stadium Championship Series, though more tours are tentatively scheduled for later this year. Events are shown via tape delay on the NBC Sports Network.
(Editor’s note: The following interview questions have been slightly rearranged for better readability.)
Dog O’Day – What is the experience of driving the Scooby-Doo truck like, as far as representing the brand of such an iconic cartoon character in the motorsports world?
Linsey Read – I love being able to represent Scooby-Doo! I think it’s a really cool truck because everybody knows who Scooby-Doo is, whether you’re a little kid or you’re 50 years old, EVERYBODY at some point has watched Scooby-Doo and they know it. The best thing Monster Jam did with that truck is that they made it look just like the character – I always tell people that it’s so cute because I have the ears and the tail that waves around as I go around the track – it’s just a really, really fun character, not just for kids, but also for adults, too.
It really is! Do you have a favorite character, just personally?
Hmm…Scooby-Doo himself is probably my favorite. I watch it all the time with my daughter, she’s hooked on that show right now, so it’s really cool that I get to share that experience with her as well.
That’s really cool. How did you get your start in Monster Jam?
I was a huge fan of Monster Jam growing up, and I used to go to the show in my hometown (El Paso, Texas) all the time, and I saw drivers like Candice Jolly in the Monster Mutt Dalmatian go through, and I saw Nicole Johnson in the Scooby-Doo truck, and they really just inspired me to go out there and try to live my dream, even though I’m a female in such a male-dominated sport.
I had a unique opportunity to drive a tough truck for the Monster Jam event, though – what we did is we took a street-legal truck out on the Monster Jam track and kind of did like a halftime show for them, and did it two years in a row, the second time I ended up getting second place and I was like milliseconds behind the first-place guy, and I had some of the Monster Jam drivers come up to me and tell me that I did a really phenomenal job, and they all asked me if I’d want to consider driving Monster Jam trucks? I was just thinking, like “Wow, they’re just saying that, nothing’s ever gonna come from it,” but I ended up sending my resume to them and that got the ball rolling, so I ended up testing for them, I went to Monster Jam University for training, and then I got my spot in Scooby-Doo.