Can Ford’s American workhorses trudge through yards of thick Canadian mud to get to the finish line?
If you go to a traditional country club, you’ll see a variety of luxury cars parked out front, some tennis courts, and the green hills of a golf course in the distance. There aren’t any Mercedes-Benz convertibles or cucumber sandwiches at the country club shown in this video. There’s not really even grass, but there’s plenty of mud – and pickup trucks bashing through it as quickly as possible.
Al Benesocky’s Filthy Red Neck Country Club in Saskatchewan, Canada recently held an event for its members called “Trucks Gone Wild.” As you can guess from the name, it didn’t involve nets, rackets, irons, or woods. It did involve drivers, though. The people behind the wheels of trucks from Dodge, Chevy, and Ford had to do their best to get their rigs through the event’s bounty hole competition.
The contest wasn’t so much a match between the different trucks as it was between the trucks and the muck beneath them. The mud bog’s watery sludge proved tough to get through completely, even for the sky-high FordSuper Dutys. Nothing seemed to work. Contestants tried running starts, but those only got them so far before Mother Nature stopped them. The massive tires were good at evacuating muck from their tread blocks up to a certain point; after that, they only succeeded in digging the trucks deeper into the earth. No amount of rpms or engine smoke helped the trucks get to the end of the course. Despite energetic and optimistic rocking back and forth from passengers, who hoped the motion would break the trucks loose, the lifted and boosted beasts could not make it all the way through the hole. Eventually, an excavator would have to yank competitors out of the brown mess.
Only one machine was able to get to the end of the bounty hole. It’s called the Sherp. It can’t haul sheetrock or help you back up a boat, but the oddly proportioned creation can sure as hell get through mud.
Derek Shiekhi's father raised him on cars. As a boy, Derek accompanied his dad as he bought classics such as post-WWII GM trucks and early Ford Mustang convertibles.
After loving cars for years and getting a bachelor's degree in Business Management, Derek decided to get an associate degree in journalism. His networking put him in contact with the editor of the Austin-American Statesman newspaper, who hired him to write freelance about automotive culture and events in Austin, Texas in 2013. One particular story led to him getting a certificate for learning the foundations of road racing.
While watching TV with his parents one fateful evening, he saw a commercial that changed his life. In it, Jeep touted the Wrangler as the Texas Auto Writers Association's "SUV of Texas." Derek knew he had to join the organization if he was going to advance as an automotive writer. He joined the Texas Auto Writers Association (TAWA) in 2014 and was fortunate to meet several nice people who connected him to the representatives of several automakers and the people who could give him access to press vehicles (the first one he ever got the keys to was a Lexus LX 570). He's now a regular at TAWA's two main events: the Texas Auto Roundup in the spring and the Texas Truck Rodeo in the fall.
Over the past several years, Derek has learned how to drive off-road in various four-wheel-drive SUVs (he even camped out for two nights in a Land Rover), and driven around various tracks in hot hatches, muscle cars, and exotics. Several of his pieces, including his article about the 2015 Ford F-150 being crowned TAWA's 2014 "Truck of Texas" and his review of the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, have won awards in TAWA's annual Excellence in Craft Competition. Last year, his JK Forum profile of Wagonmaster, a business that restores Jeep Wagoneers, won prizes in TAWA’s signature writing contest and its pickup- and SUV-focused Texas Truck Invitational.
