Scott Park: From NASCAR to Mountain Top |
| Gordon White | Friday, 29 May, 2009 | ||||||||||||||||||
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Scott Park, winner of our Camper Mod Showdown, gives us the inside track on truck camping at NASCAR races and takes us to the top of the mountain where other RVs don't dare go.  Scott Park recently won our $100 Fuel Card Camper Mod Showdown Contest with his impressive NASCAR observation platform. When we followed up with Scott, we asked him for an interview to learn more about his truck camping experiences at NASCAR races. As it turns out, there a lot more to Scott’s interest in truck camping and NASCAR. This is one story that doesn’t just drive in circles.
TCM: Tell us how you got into truck camping. Scott: We have been RVing for a long time. We started with just a pickup truck and a camper shell and then moved up to a tent trailer when we had children. We ended up with a Weekend Warrior, a large toy hauler trailer with a rear ramp and lots of room. With two daughters who liked to bring their friends with them, the toy hauler had lots of room for everybody. Now our kids are married off and don’t travel with us anymore so we went looking for an RV that would fit our needs. We looked at everything from Class-A motorhomes to fifth wheels and finally decided that a truck camper was our best option. TCM: What was it about truck campers that made them your best option? Scott: It was a couple of things. First, we like to go to areas that are less developed. Our biggest concern with a larger motorhome or towable was that it would be hard or impossible to get to the places we like to go. Truck campers are a size that really works well and allows us to go anywhere. Of course any small Class-C would have also fulfilled that need, but the second thing we were looking for was safety. In a previous life I was a firefighter. From a safety point of view, I like to have full vehicle seat belts and airbags. With a Class-A or Class-C motorhome, you are driving in formation with everything you have. That means your pots, pans, and everything else you have with you will be coming out the back your head in an accident. Modern trucks certainly aren’t perfect, but they’re a heck of a lot safer to drive than motorhomes. So those are the two primary reasons why we chose a truck camper. I’m not willing to compromise my safety and I wanted the ability to go where I wanted to go. TCM: Tell us about some of these campgrounds where motorhomes and towables wouldn’t dare go. Scott: There are two campgrounds that are really inaccessible by anything other than a truck camper. One is a campground in Great Basin, Nevada. It’s a twelve-mile road up the mountain to get to the campground. There are signs warning you that no vehicles over twenty-five feet long are permitted. We drove our truck camper up the mountain to the campground without any difficulty and found a beautiful campground at about 10,500 feet. That’s pretty high country for the middle of Nevada. All the other vehicles in the campground where Honda Accords and Volkswagen Jettas. No other type of RV would make it up that mountain. Another favorite remote campground is Whitney Portal here in Owens Valley, California. It’s located on the eastern side of the Sierras outside of the town of Lone Pine. The town is the access point to Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental United States. There’s a windy road crawling up the side of the mountain to get to the campground. Again our truck camper gives us the ability to go were other vehicles and larger motorhomes cannot go. TCM: Tell us about your truck and camper. How did you choose your combination? Scott: I started from zero. We didn’t have a truck or a camper. I shopped around and eventually settled on the Lance 1181. It’s their largest camper and weighs about 4,000 pounds. So, logically, I then went to look for the right truck to haul it. I’m a belt and suspenders kind of guy and I didn’t want a truck that was right on the line of its carrying capacity. Fortunately, Ford had just announced their new F450 with a real truck bed on it and a fully civilized cab interior. Prior to that, Ford only offered a cab and chassis model which needed a bed to be put on it. With the Lance 1181, we wouldn’t be anywhere near the F450’s payload capacity. It really boiled down to the fact that the Ford F450 was the only truck that could give us that margin of payload. I would have preferred a Chevy Duramax diesel, but Chevy didn’t offer a vehicle that could match the Ford’s payload capacity. The Ford came standard with a diesel engine and crew cab. We didn’t need the crew cab, but it’s nice to have a place to throw stuff and the flexibility to give somebody a ride. TCM: How do you like your F450? Scott: We’ve been exceptionally happy with the Ford. TCM: Have you modified it in any way? Scott: The only significant modification we have made to the truck was a change to the rear springs. The factory spring system made for a nice ride when the truck was empty, but with the camper loaded, the truck would drop four to five inches in the rear. That much sag looked pretty strange going down the road. To fix the sag, we converted the truck to have a commercial F450 rear end. There’s a spring shop here in Bakersfield that’s very familiar with these kinds of commercial trucks. They actually didn’t change the springs, they just reshaped the springs and changed the brackets. Now the truck has a slight rake when unloaded of about one to two inches. When the camper is loaded, the truck levels out and the ride is really nice. TCM: Did you make any other modifications to your truck? Scott: The only other modification I’ve done to the truck is to add a higher capacity Titan fuel tank. Stock from the factory, the truck has a thirty-four gallon diesel tank. With the Titan tank installed, I now have sixty-five gallons of diesel available. I installed the tank myself, which was pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get over ten miles to the gallon unloaded and about eight and a half miles per gallon loaded. With that kind of fuel mileage, thirty-four gallons would not get me too far. I needed the extra fuel tank. TCM: Any truck camper adventures planned for this summer? Scott: We planned another trip to Arizona and the Grand Canyon, but we’ve had to cancel it due to issues with a family member who is sick. As of right now, we need to stay close to home for family reasons. We do have one little weekend trip planned to the Mammoth Lakes area later this summer. In the future, we want to head up to Alaska. We also want to camp in the infield at Daytona. TCM: How did you get into NASCAR? Scott: I’m very interested in technology, so that’s the biggest draw it has for me. There’s also a lot of logistics that go into a NASCAR event that interest me. And there’s the whole competitive side of the actual competition that’s also interesting. We really were not big NASCAR fans until a few years ago. We started to hang out with friends who know everything there is to know about NASCAR. While hanging out with them, we got the idea of going to Vegas to see our first NASCAR race. For that first race, we sat in the stands and got the race experience. We were hooked. After the race in Vegas, we went to NASCAR races in Phoenix and Daytona. For NASCAR fans, Daytona is the Super Bowl - it’s the big one. It’s also the first race of the year in February. We just happen to go to the 50th running of the race and were fully immersed in NASCAR. TCM: When did you start taking your truck camper to the races? Scott: There are RVs all over the place at NASCAR races. That’s what sparked my interest in taking our RV to a NASCAR race and camping in the infield. We talked it over and decided that the limiting factor was that it’s difficult to see the race on the ground. There’s a sea of RVs that camp in the inside field. That’s where the idea to build a platform came in. TCM: You’re referring to the platform that won our first Camper Mod Showdown Contest. Scott: Yes. I first did a little research to follow the NASCAR rules on platforms. You just can’t stand on your RV. The rules say that you need to have guardrails if you want to stand on your RV. So I put together some plans to build a platform with all the safety stuff. Some people build wood frame platforms on-site at the NASCAR races. They use 2x4 lumber and even PVC pipe. What I ended up with is overkill compared to what some other people have. There are some people who have professional looking platforms. TCM: Who designed and built the platform? Scott: I actually built the platform in about two weeks. It’s built primarily out of aluminum. In another past life, I owned a manufacturing business and did a lot of machine work. So I was able to design the platform and laser cut or water jet the parts. The final platform ended up being a little different than my original design. On the original design, the platform was going to flip off the backside of the camper and become a patio. Then I decided to just keep the platform on top of the camper. If I had to build another, I could do it a lot faster, a lot lighter, and a lot cheaper. TCM: Has the platform met your expectations? Scott: Yes. The platform has definitely worked out. TCM: How do you get reservations for an infield campsite at a NASCAR race? Scott: It can be hard to get spots in the infield. Once you do get a spot, they offer it to you for the next year. Fortunately, or unfortunately, things were slowing down in both the RV world and the NASCAR world and we were able to get spots in the infield. TCM: How many infield RV spots are there at a typical NASCAR racetrack? Scott: The infield at a NASCAR race has about 1,000 RV spots. I remember wondering why so many people take an RV to a NASCAR race. Then it dawned on me that many of these races are in remote locations, especially the southern racetracks. You can either commute forty or fifty miles to the race from the closest town or city, or you can bring in your RV and stay at the race. It also becomes a big party environment. It’s a huge three-day tailgating event. TCM: That sounds like a lot more than just the race. Scott: The neat thing is the immersion. Even the drivers have their motorhomes at the track. So you have forty drivers in their high-end RVs within a couple hundred yards of where you are camping. Then their haulers show up with their cars on Thursday evening. It’s very impressive to see forty-five semi trucks parking in such a small area with their crews rolling out their tools, supplies, and cars. They go from zero to hero in a few short hours. So there’s a lot of other things going on other than just the race itself. You can watch the cars getting set up and prepared for qualifying. You can jump up on your camper and watch Tony Stewart drive his qualifying run. You can go to pit row where I took the picture of all those tires. They go through twelve sets of tires for just one race. All of this is going on in and you’re right there, at home with your camper. TCM: Thanks for the interview Scott. Is there anything I didn’t ask that you would like to add to your interview? Scott: There is a lot of interest in our truck camper rig when we go to the NASCAR races. Most people have forty-foot motorhomes and fifth wheels loaded to the gills. It’s refreshing to hear people tell us that they had no idea truck campers had so much room. People have said to us, “You know, this is making me think. I don’t need a forty-foot RV when it’s just my wife and I.” We must have heard this everyday, two or three times a day, for the three days. There is a logic to truck campers. I used to wonder why Camping World sponsored NASCAR races. But when I actually saw how many RVs there were at a NASCAR race, I wondered why they didn’t do it sooner. I believe there’s a huge potential for truck campers at NASCAR races. TCM: I agree.
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