LIVERMORE — Up against the barriers, all you can hear is the revving and humming of mud truck engines.

Bigger and more powerful than a regular car or truck, over 400 of these mega machines attempted to complete obstacle courses, speed races and mud pits at Trucks Gone Wild Saturday afternoon. 

Neal Gagne of Top Notch Fabrication in Lewiston made it to the event with a completed truck. Unfortunately, during test runs Friday night, the belt on Mud Life Crisis II broke, bringing the whole ignition system to a halt. 

“We blew a belt, so now it’s unfortunately just an ornament,” Gagne said. “We tested it Friday night — it wouldn’t start — and we figured out this morning what it was.” 

‘We’re happy we finished, but depressed,” he said.

Gagne and his crew are hoping to get it up and running for Sunday’s races. 

Despite not running Saturday, the megatruck was still a spectacle, drawing the attention of the crowd. 

The Gagne crew were among over 3,000 attendees at Saturday’s races.

“This is a big mudding family,” Jen Gagne said. “Everyone’s friendly here.”

David Lovewell, owner of The Barnyard, said he’s been doing this for a while.

“We played in the fields for a while, before we got organized,” he said.

And now his organized and official events draw quite a crowd.

James Wood drove his truck in the Friday night race, and that was his first and last of the weekend. His truck rolled over and off the jump hill five times. Once it came to a stop, the whole vehicle went up in flames. 

“The cage and the five strap harness,” Jen Gagne said. “That’s what saves them.”

“That was the scariest thing I’ve ever been involved in,” Wood said. “I wasn’t lined up for the jump, tried to swerve out of the way but caught the side (of the jump) and rolled and rolled and rolled. I was just thinking, ‘When is this gonna stop?’

“It finally did,” Wood said. “And that’s when the fire started. The crew hit me with the fire extinguisher and I couldn’t breathe.”

Someone had to pull him out of the wreck, he said. 

“Safety is our No. 1 priority here,” he said. “Things can go really wrong, really fast.” 

The crew is always ready with fire extinguishers and tow trucks to pull out stuck vehicles. 

And if a something breaks, comes loose or feels wrong, Dr. Steve of Dr. Steve’s Transmission Clinic out of Manchester, New Hampshire, was on site to fix it. 

A sudden, one o’clock rainstorm didn’t deter the drivers or the crowd.

“It keeps the dust down,” Jen said. “And hey, rain makes mud. It wouldn’t be Trucks Gone Wild without a storm.”

Jim Doke, a longtime mudder, is retiring after this season. He showed up for the weekend with his blue mustang riding high on megatruck tires. According to Jen, he’s a really great driver and loves to put on a show.

“I’ve been doing this since 1980,” he said. “I would play in the streets, until one encounter with the police in 1983 where they told me I was taking it ‘beyond the law.’ That’s why my truck is named ‘Beyond The Law.'”

Despite loving the sport and the people, he said he decided to retire because “life takes you in different directions.”

Don’t go thinking mudding is a boys-only sport. There were plenty of incredible female drivers taking home prizes and showing off this weekend. 

Natashia Garber of Newcastle has been racing mud trucks for 14 years now.

“I love the adrenaline rush,” she said. 

Her husband also races, and they’re usually competing against each other.

“It’s fun, but we are competitive,” she said. “But winning isn’t everything.”

Garber said she’s always liked mud-running and off-roading.

“I just started playing around and it evolved over the years, faster and faster and bigger and bigger tires,” Garber said.

Ans she loves being able to show the boys that girls can hand it to them.

“I just love to do it, love the people,” she said. “You make so many friends and I always look forward to racing with them.”

Sabrina Cummings of Bar Harbor is excited to finally get out to race this season.

“This has been the most hectic season for my team,” she said. “We had a lot of transmission issues earlier this season, so this is the first time I’ve really been out.”

She said that Garber is her racing idol.

“She’s fearless,” she said. 

Cummings wishes there were more females competing.

“It’s a male-dominated sport, which makes it hard, but it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “I just wish there were more females out here. There’s no difference between a man and a woman driving.”