From the football field to dirt track: How Monster Jam takes over the Dome

Where football fans cheer and basketball fans pack the stands, the JMA Wireless Dome is becoming something else: a dirt track for Monster Jam, which brought trucks like Grave Digger, Megalodon and El Toro Loco to Syracuse this weekend.

It takes about 300 truckloads of dirt, and long days for the crew to make that happen, and the work starts only a couple days before the first engine revs.

“We’ll be trucking dirt in until five to six o’clock tonight, so that will be a good 11 to 12 hour day of trucking,” Neal Kulp, construction and track supervisor for Monster Jam said. “Then a few hours in the morning to get the remaining yardage we need into the building.”

Behind the dirt is months of planning. 

Before transforming the Dome, the team visits for a pre-trip, meaning they check the area before they map out the track to figure out what can properly fit. Since every building is different, multiple maps are needed. 

Monster Jam has been to the Dome before, which helps. For the past 15 years the Dome has been a pit stop for this event. 

 “We have already been here before so we have old measurements that we can go off of,” Kulp said. “We will have ramps, buried cars and obstacles that the trucks can backflip off.”

The Dome’s structure also amplifies the noise. Even during setup, the sound of construction, plates and ramps dropping echoed through the building.

The show will bring about 35,000 fans to the Dome, and the noise they hear will be a big step up from what crews are making now.

“This is actually as quiet as it’s going to be,” Kulp said. “When the trucks [monster trucks] are running they’re way louder than what’s going on right now.”

Photo by Paul Hakimian

Grounds crew members work to upright a turned-over truck at Friday’s driver rehearsal in the JMA Wireless Dome.