Small fleet participation in Overdrive’s Pride & Polish and similar truck beauty shows helps raise a business’ profile with drivers by virtue of equipment excellence. “It’s given us more visibility,” says Fleenor Bros.’ Kyle Cousins, whose pictured Kenworth brought him big wins in this year’s Pride & Polish National Championship. “We’ve been in Joplin for 20 years, and there were people in Joplin who didn’t know we were there.” Today, “people know us by Overdrive’s interviews” and the standard of excellence shown in winning equipment. “Right now, we have a waiting list to put drivers on.”
If this custom Kenworth Icon 900 looks familiar, perhaps you were at the Great American Trucking Show, where it made its Overdrive‘s Pride & Polish debut.
If not, you might be one of the thousands who saw my prior “First look” vid of the Kenworth Icon 900 when the model made a big splash at the Mid-American Trucking Show earlier this year.
Kyle Cousins (pictured, middle), part owner and operator of the 30-truck Fleenor Bros. hazmat fleet out of Carthage, Mo., with team members Sid Calangelo (left); Counsins’ wife, Sara with son Kolton; and head shop man Kenny Coffey, pulled in first in the “new” category in the GATS Pride & Polish, and we talked immediately off the awards show on Saturday. In that talk, I learned the truck was in fact the very same unit that had been out on the show floor at MATS, Cousins and co. taking delivery then from a dealer a month or two later out of Glasgow, Ky., and giving it a custom skin with partners from Thunder Graphics (the stripe treatment mimics the Icon factory stripe pattern) to a bevy of other suppliers.
A lot about it has changed, as you’ll see in the “second look” vid below. They’ve done a bang-up job on it, for sure, and you can fully expect to see more of it in 2016 Pride & Polish competition, says Cousins.
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Make a comparison look in the “first look” vid that follows the update version below, itself followed by a gallery of images from my shoot with the rig this past Saturday.
And stay tuned over the next year, Cousins adds. There’s a lot more in store.
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