Friendships Grow as NTDC Gets Under Way

This story appears in the Aug. 24 print edition of Transport Topics.

PITTSBURGH — Day-to-day on the job, driving a truck is a mostly solitary occupation, which explains in part why the National Truck Driving Championships attract so many repeat contestants, coming back year after year to rub shoulders with other top drivers from around the country, as well as to carry on their quest for a trophy.

“Exactly,” said Jeff Langenhahn, a Con-way Freight driver from Wisconsin competing for a second year at the nationals held here last week.

“It just seems like once I started competing, you get to know a group of guys that usually compete every year, and it’s just nice to meet up with them and see how they’re all doing [in] the hope of someday winning a national championship,” Langenhahn said.

This year, 415 drivers participated in the competition, where the collegiality was as thick as the competition was stiff.

“We welcome new people coming in and try to help them along and encourage more people to compete,” Langenhahn said.

Scores of drivers and their families flooded the streets of the city wearing T-shirts bearing some of the most famous trucking logos in the world, from private fleets such as Wal-Mart to huge carriers such as YRC Worldwide.

American Trucking Associations established and still sponsors the National Truck Driving Championships, which last week were in the 72nd year of competition.

And for the first time this year, 33 step van drivers had a competition of their own, now that the event is the NTDC and the National Step Van Driving Championships.

All the drivers who competed at the nationals were already state champions when they arrived, but John Smith Jr. of Tupelo, Miss., was in a class few contestants ever reach.

A driver for FedEx Ground and a member of a trucking family, Smith already had won two national titles, in 2007 as the champion driver in the flatbed class and in 2008 as the champion in the tanker class. In all, he’s competed five different years at the nationals.

The rules allowed him to compete in tanker again this year and if he has his way the nationals will be a way of life for him, just as driving is a way of life.

Competing, he said, is good for him and for his firm, which has six trucks contracted to FedEx.

“I love safety,” said Smith, surrounded by a crowd of FedEx drivers all wearing company T-shirts. “I love driving safe. It makes me better at my job. When I get home safe, I know that everybody’s family got home safe that day that I was around,” Smith said.

For three days the drivers competed on the Pittsburgh convention center floor, solving maneuvering problems presented to them by a panel of judges, some of whom are past champions. The national competition is known as the “Super Bowl of Safety” because the competition is designed to promote and test safe driving habits and techniques.

Besides the new step van competition, there are eight classes in the NTDC in which drivers can compete: straight truck, sleeper berth, three-axle, four-axle, five-axle, flatbed, tank and twins.

Under the NTDC rules, drivers are allowed to compete in a class of truck that they don’t normally drive in their day-to-day job. However, they must be certified to drive in that class in their home states.

In addition to competing against one another in a driving contest on the convention floor, all the contestants must also compete in a written exam and in a pre-trip inspection competition.

The driver with the greatest point spread over his and her peers is the contestant named the grand champion at the Saturday night banquet.

It’s the possibility of winning a championship in a class or the more elusive goal of becoming a grand champion that brings so many drivers back year after year in a quest for that trophy.

Lynn Springer, a driver for YRC at its Portland, Ore., terminal, was attending his sixth national competition last week. He was one of five Oregon champions who came to the national competition from YRC’s Portland terminal.

“We’re all friends and we practice together,” said Springer, who was competing in the flatbed class.

For one of the five, Andy Smith, who competed in the sleeper berth class, it was his first trip to the national competition, an experience he said was “indescribably” exciting.

“It’s such an honor to be here, I’ll tell you,” Smith said about the training he went through on the way to winning the state championship that allowed him to compete nationally.

“And a lot of it was just the people we worked together with as a group,” Smith said. “We put in four to six hours on a weekend day . . . and every day I practiced a little something.”

After taking his written test Aug. 19, Smith emerged saying, “You can never study hard enough. I missed a few but I know I also got a few.”

Practice is so intense at both the state and national levels, all the drivers said, that often the effort to win a championship becomes a family affair.

Con-way’s Langenhahn said his wife studies the ATA’s book “Facts for Drivers” as hard as he does in order to quiz him in preparation for the written exam. The couple had four children at home cheering, and Langenhahn said his son imitates his dad by setting up obstacle courses for trucks on his bedroom floor.