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Rock crawlers like Jake Good, pictured here, get a thrill from four-wheeling across trails marked by boulders, cliffs and trees. At right, Jake relies on
his Cooper Discoverer STTs to get him out of tight spots.

Four-Wheeler Crawls to Top with Discoverer STTs

Editor’s note: One of Cooper’s newest sponsorships is for four-wheel drivers in the W.E.ROCK rock crawling series, in which participants try to keep points as low as possible by accurately navigating through an obstacle course marked by boulders, cliffs and trees. Separately, Cooper also acts as corporate sponsor for Hannibal Rocks Off-Road Park in Hannibal, Mo., where the RROCK regional series of W.E.ROCK stages its events. In this interview, sophomore rock crawler Jake Good, using Cooper Discoverer STTs for the first time this year and currently ranked first in the RROCK Championship, describes the thrills he finds in strategizing every precarious foot across an often-treacherous terrain.

First, please tell me a little about yourself.
I’m 30, and I’m an engineering technician, working for a civil engineering firm in Kansas City, Mo. I’ve been in engineering for about eight years overall.
My wife is Amanda, a leasing agent for heavy equipment, and we have two kids. Caleb is 3 and Colby is 6.

When and how did you get into this adrenaline-pumping sport?
I grew up with my parents going to Colorado and running mining roads. Back then, four-wheeling involved sort of a rough gravel road. For as long as I can remember, that’s what we’d do on vacation. We’d go and explore mining roads. Most of the scariest stuff we’d encounter would be on a mountain pass where you have a 1,500-foot drop on one side, where you have a tire 8-10 inches from the edge. It wasn’t really anything hard to do, driving, but it was more of a mental challenge.
So it kind of surprises me when my dad gets nervous when he sees us running courses now. But I guess we’ve really pushed the limits of what he used to do, four-wheeling.
In 1994, I started driving with an old early Bronco – which is what I still wheel with the family. So I’ve pretty much been into this all my life.

How did you get into professional competition in off-roading?
I’ve wheeled with a lot of people who’ve been big advocates of the sport, and those people encouraged me. Then, getting into the competitive aspect of the sport gave me a way to judge my driving skills against some of the best people in the nation.
Last year was our rookie season. We actually just kind of tossed together a vehicle out of parts I had laying around the house. We went out to have fun and see where we ranked against these guys. We ended up taking second place in the RROCK series, behind the national champion for W.E.ROCK. That set the stage for us to put a little more pressure on ourselves this year, to try and go for the championship.

What is your goal for this year?
Basically, we’ve set our sights on trying to win the RROCK championship for this year. We’ve also set our sights on the All-Stock Nationals.
Currently the only national organization sanctioning body is W.E.ROCK. They run two divisions, the West Coast series, and the East Coast series. RROCK is probably the largest regional series, and all their events are held at Hannibal Rocks Off-Road Park in Hannibal, Mo. The top three out of each regional series will qualify for the All-Stock Nationals.

How would you characterize the people who get involved in this overall?
Most of them are just hard-working people who work an 8-to-5 job. Their main personality trait is to be outdoorsy.
Most of them can be out four-wheeling in the woods with a couple friends, and that’s their be-all, end-all. We don’t really require a lot. We just like to explore new territory. We’re adventurous, I guess you’d say.

This would seem to be an expensive sport, what with getting trapped by boulders, experiencing rollovers and having to be winched out of tight spaces. Do lots of parts have to be replaced?
It’s definitely not cheap. There are different levels. But most of us in the sport have to build our own vehicles, because we can’t afford to buy everything we need to be competitive. Most of us will piece things together out of junkyard vehicles, or machine our own parts, to put together a rig that will hold together for us.

Is there any competitiveness between the people who machine their own parts and people who buy them?
We mainly judge people on the way that they drive. Derek West, for example, had a very simplistic rig, and yet he has won almost everything he’s ever competed in – he was the unbeaten national champion last year. Anything that he lacked in parts, he made up for in his driving. So having expensive parts can only get you so far in this sport. You’ve got to have a vehicle that doesn’t break down, but you’ve also got to have a very good spotter and a very good driver. You have to have everything in place in order to be successful here.

What is a spotter?
It’s something that’s unique to our sport. He’s basically the driver’s extra set of eyes and hands outside the vehicle. He dictates all the things I do in the vehicle. He walks on ahead and guides me through, over the rocks or to make sure I’m missing cones. He can actually stack rocks to prevent a tire from falling into holes and getting the underbelly stuck on rocks. That’s allowed under the rules. So it’s a very physically demanding job. They have to be able to read the terrain in order to find out what path the vehicle is going to wind up on, to have the foresight to get you through what you need to. He’s basically the one who makes me look good. Scott Angell is my spotter.

What are the rules for this sport?
You start a course with zero points. You’re trying to get as few points as possible. So you receive a point for every reverse that you take. If you run over a cone – which marks the course boundary and sets its difficulty -- that’s a 10-point penalty. You want to end up with as few points as possible. Sometimes there’s a set of bonus cones, or gates, and if you’re able to go through that, you get a negative-10 points. So there’s really a lot of strategy involved in how you go about a course. You’ve got to do it fluently. And sometimes the obstacles are so hard, you have to run over a cone. It’s a real big head game, in trying to beat not only the other competitors, but trying to beat the courses. Just about everybody uses those same basic principles.

Ever curse the people who lay out the courses?
Oh yes! (chuckling) But that’s what gives us our adrenaline rush. It’s moving us out of our comfort zone. I know for a fact that if we were just out on a trail somewhere, and we came across some of these obstacles, I would definitely find another way around them. But given the competition, it definitely changes things.

Still picture doing this when you’re 60?
I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, frankly. If this is something my kids like to do, we’ll be out there doing it as long as we’re able.

Ever take your kids four-wheeling?
Yes. They have a full five-point safety harness and we strap them in.

Is this a spectator sport?
On the competition side, they’ve worked real hard to make it spectator-friendly. They’ve condensed everything you’re doing on the trail, and brought it into one place, so you can watch and not have to hike a long way.
But we’re not going fast, by any means. Sometimes, you’d measure our progress in feet per hour.

What do you think of Cooper Discoverer STTs on these courses?
They’re very surprising. They’ve exceeded my expectations and performed a lot better than I thought they would. It does not look like an aggressive tire. We normally run something that has very open lugs. There are competitor tires with similar tread designs to Cooper, but they don’t perform as well. The Discoverers supersede on road driving, that’s for sure.
They’re a very stable tire, as far as sidewall deflection. The tread pattern really grips, both on wet muddy rock and on dry rock.
We’re definitely glad to be a part of the Cooper team.

Riding on his Cooper Discoverer STTs, Jake placed first in RROCK competition at Hannibal Rocks on May 3, and placed second in W.E.ROCK, also at Hannibal Rocks, on April 25-27.

Spotters like Jake's teammate Scott Angell are crucial for helping drivers navigate around cones and obstacles.

Rock crawling isn't for the faint of heart, as Jake demonstrates here during a recent professional competition.

Jake celebrates a second-place W.E.ROCK event finish with his kids, Caleb, 3, and Colby, 6.