Plato will be participating in the Sonoma County Fair’s Monster Truck show, to be held at the fairgrounds on Aug.
Now a savvy 13-year-old, on the cusp of eighth grade, he will roll into Santa Rosa’s Chris Beck Arena next Friday night in his 10,000-pound behemoth, Skull Krusher, with the distinction of being the world’s youngest professional monster truck driver. Six years and dozens of shows later, Shane Plato, who lives with his family in Cloverdale, has graduated from mini-monster trucks to the real deal. Turned out Charlene was fine, as well.Īfter the truck was righted, Shane drove back to the grandstand, waved to the crowd, then made sure to thank the event sponsor during an interview with the trackside announcer.Įven at that tender age, he’d watched so many monster truck videos on YouTube, his dad Lee said, that “he knew what to do, and what to say, to ease the crowd.” “She thought she was having a heart attack,” said Lee Plato, Charlene’s husband and Shane’s dad. “I was just sitting in my truck” - strapped in, upside-down, biding his time - “and everyone was trying to get to me,” recalled Plato, who was 7 at the time and didn’t suffer even a scratch, although the medics did briefly attend to his mother. The crowd gasped, and paramedics came running. Shane Plato remembered the first time he flipped his mini-monster truck.
