Trucker’s Day: Our Report from the Festival of the Most Beautiful Trucks

Heat. Scorching heat. A vast asphalt field filled with hundreds of the most beautiful trucks in the country. Bass thumping out of subwoofers, locomotive horns, smoke pouring from vertical stacks, and garlands of evening lights shimmering along the tractors. This is TruckDay, held for the second time at Yakhroma, near Moscow.

I missed TruckDay last year. I had caught a cold but still meant to go — until Wagner’s march on Moscow made the organizers cancel. This time I telephoned one of them, my old friend the Belarusian trucker Konstantin Bulatsky: “Count me in, I’ll be there.”

Thirty Years of Truck Festivals, From Hannover to Louisville

Events of this kind have been a tradition in Europe and America for decades. Back in 1994 — thirty years ago — I went to one in Hannover, Germany, and marvelled at custom-painted tractors of a sort nobody in Russia had seen at the time. I even met a colourful couple, Heike and Marion Wunsch, who had turned up in a Soviet blue KrAZ styled to look like an American rig. The American influence at European truck festivals runs deep: drivers and their partners in coonskin hats and leather boots, country and rock coming off the stage.

The same spirit fills the annual trucker festival at the Nürburgring, which coincides with the truck racing in mid-July. I have been several times: beer and schnapps flowing, dozens of souvenir tents, trucks lit up through the night, the whole thing closing with fireworks. I have been to the truck shows in Louisville, Kentucky, too, where America’s most beautiful tractors gather. Smaller, but the sight of long-nose trucks glowing with thousands of lights after dark is not something you forget.

How TruckDay Came About

And now there is a genuine festival of beautiful trucks in Russia. TruckFest events had been held before, on a smaller scale. When the organizers there switched to paid participation the truckers revolted — and as the cult American film Convoy taught us, angry truckers are a force to reckon with. So they made a non-commercial festival of their own: TruckDay. They found a huge asphalt lot near Yakhroma, brought in sponsors, charged participants nothing and visitors 500 rubles if they were over 14. Sponsor support was strong enough this year that two pallets of kvass were given away — take two bottles, take five.

What Was on the Field

There were food courts, souvenir tents selling everything down to roof-mounted “chandelier” spotlights, showers if you brought your own water, and a children’s area where the kids were allowed to paint two real trucks with water-based colours. On the stage, Max Vertigo sang the songs that drivers hold dear — one of them the tale of a 40 RUS heavy hauler who is never afraid of work and can explain, if pressed, exactly why he keeps to the roadside.

New Trucks, New Trailers, and 1:43 Models

Unlike Germany, where manufacturers such as Mercedes sponsor whole pavilions with beer, sausages and merchandise, no OEM backed this festival. Companies did come, though — RMG (Russian World of Trucks), which imports European trucks through parallel channels. A new Volvo FH costs 19.5 million rubles, but lightly used examples under three years old sell better: cheaper, and with lower recycling fees.

The festival also hosted the debut of Brenor, a new semi-trailer brand from Domodedovo. With the European trailer makers gone from the market, the niche needed filling. Trailer #001 was on show: SAF axles and landing legs, Russian plywood flooring, aluminium rails, a price of about 6 million rubles. Sales start this autumn.

There were model trucks for sale, naturally — not Chinese ones but Russian-built 1:43 scale models from Yuri and Vadim of Arkhangelsk. Some are wholly original, with 3D-printed cabs; others are reworked from donor models. The upgrade lists read like a real workshop’s: “equipped with a YaMZ-238 engine, opening hood, working rear suspension, and steerable front axle.” For Yuri and Vadim this is a hobby. One of them builds ships; the other drives an Iveco Stralis.

370 Trucks in Ten Categories

Last year 190 trucks registered. This year there were 370, spread across ten categories:

• Titan — Volvo
• Super — Scania
• PACCAR — DAF
• Besser & Büssing — Mercedes and MAN
• AmericanTruck
• Original — other brands
• Oldskool — over 20 years old
• Power — tow trucks and special equipment
• Goinstyle — harmonized tractor-trailer rigs
• MKT — light commercial vehicles, mostly tuned GAZelle Next vans with booming subwoofers

Cups and prizes were awarded in every one of them.

Walking the rows was dazzling: custom paintwork, detail without end, luxurious interiors, lighting, sound systems, multi-tone horns. Strictly speaking much of it is not road-legal, but so long as the owners do not dazzle oncoming drivers with their chandeliers or play “La Cucaracha” at the traffic police, inspectors tend to look the other way. These are not men who merely like their trucks; they cherish them and keep them immaculate. Often enough a traffic officer stops one simply to admire it and ask, “How much did it cost?”

What the Tuning Costs

A great deal, is the answer. The prize-winner from Klimovsk who took home four cups — Titan, Best European, Best Custom Shop and Best Sound — spent 4.5 million rubles on work done by a small shop in Krasnodar. Truck tuning shops of that kind are slowly appearing in Russia.

A Volvo FH rig from Barnaul drew a question from a small boy: “Do you really work with this truck?” Told that the answer was yes, he turned to his mother — “See, working on a truck like this is a pleasure!” The carriers sigh about it: “Sadly, clients don’t care what truck delivers their cargo. But we still invest, customize, order parts…” And it is worth doing. On the highway a beautiful rig is a rarity. Here they were everywhere.

Tuning does tip over into kitsch from time to time, and even those trucks have their admirers. Participants joked about one owner from Yaroslavl who had hung every accessory imaginable on his ageing Freightliner Columbia, belching black smoke and sounding a multi-tone siren that meowed. At night the thing glowed like a fairground ride. Kitsch or not, he won the audience award.

The Supercup: A Freightliner Century From Barnaul

The supercup itself, voted for by the other winners, went to Lev Levchenko from Barnaul. His Freightliner Century had once been a wreck with no bumper and a smashed hood.

It was transformed: the front axle moved forward, new bodywork, polished parts, an interior redone from scratch, and a towering gear lever topped with a grinning piston knob, glowing red eyes and a “cigarette sleeve.” The result is a proper cowboy truck in the Western style, good enough for an American truck show. Lev’s mission is to bring the culture of beautiful American tractors to Russia.

Other American rigs turned up as well, and a few Chinese ones. What struck me most, though, was this: standing among fleets of beautiful European trucks, you would never guess how completely the Chinese have taken over the highways. A heartwarming sight.

Russian Iron: MAZ, KAMAZ, ZIL — and a 147 km/h Tractor

A blue-metallic MAZ with a custom-painted cab stood out, as did several restyled KAMAZ K4 and K5 rigs. From St Petersburg came two white showpieces, a Mercedes Actros and a KAMAZ K4, both with reworked cabins and unusual steering wheels — the Actros with a ZIL-130 wheel. Two ZILs, a lifted dump truck on a 130 base and a trial rig with all-wheel steering, were among the oldest vehicles present.

Another standout was a 1994 Mercedes SK from Sergiev Posad with EPS electro-pneumatic shifting — the forerunner of today’s automated manuals. I drove a Mercedes like it across the Alps once myself.

But the real showstopper was a tractor — literally a tractor. Alexander Malyar came from Yekaterinburg with a completely rebuilt 1997 MTZ Belarus, modified for Bison Track Show racing. Engine and gearbox tuned, a new independent front suspension and front brakes fitted, which a standard MTZ does not have at all. Top speed went from 34 km/h to 147 km/h. Fuel consumption, since you ask, is around 12 l/100 km. He even towed a homemade trailer of tools and spares behind it. Sadly, at a later tractor race near Saratov, Malyar rolled the machine at speed; he was unhurt, but it needs major repairs. The trucker-tractor-driver remains cheerful about it.

A Motorhome on a Sadko Next

Among the most inspiring participants were Svetlana and Vladimir Petrukhin from Tula, who built their own motorhome on a GAZ Sadko Next. They bought the chassis in 2021 for 2.3 million rubles and put another 1.5 million into turning it into a rolling home: a torsion-flexing subframe, hot water heating, solar power, a washing machine, a dishwasher. Fuel-saving modifications brought consumption down to 18–20 l/100 km.

One Incident, and a Lot of Goodwill

The festival was not entirely without incident: one tuned GAZelle came off its handbrake and rolled into another vehicle, and its owner was expelled and stripped of the first place he had won for audio. Everything else about the atmosphere was cooperative. The recovery crews let me cool off in the cab of their 600 hp Volvo FH, and I got a ride with Khachatur from Krasnodar, who had come with his son and his grandson and three custom trucks between them.

Meanwhile, in St Petersburg, an “American Truck Fest” was announced. Five tractors turned up, two of them European Volvos, plus a dump truck — less a festival than a meet-up.

“Is This Your Heartbeat?”

As I was finishing this piece, Kostya Bulatsky rang from abroad. He had just been to Truckstar in the Netherlands, 2,200 participants strong, and was on his way to Finland’s Power Truck Show, driving the same Scania S530 Super that had stood at Yakhroma. So in spite of everything, our convoy reached an international truck festival after all.

Thirty years ago in Germany somebody gave me a red blinking pin. That evening a man pointed at the light and asked whether it was my heartbeat. I nodded: of course it is. I would say the same today.

Because in “a world where the winds never rest,” this is an island of joy and friendship. It was touching to have Autoreview readers at the festival ask when my report would appear, and beg: “Please don’t stop printing the paper edition.” And because — believe me, I have followed the trucking scene a long time — our festivals are now no worse than the ones at the Nürburgring or at Louisville. And they will only get better.

Photo: Fedor Lapshin

This is a translation. You can read the original article here: День дальнобойщика: наш репортаж с фестиваля самых красивых грузовиковртаж с «Шелкового пути»