Regular Overdrive readers might be familiar with Oakley Trucking-leased pneumatic tank puller John McCormick’s “Bandit” 2021 Kenworth W900L, two years ago the winner in the Working Bobtail class of Overdrive‘s Pride & Polish. In 2023, then, Bandit added to the owner-operator’s trophy case with a second place finish for the interior at the Mid-America Trucking Show that year, among other honors.
For the 2024 Pride & Polish contest, McCormick’s Cummins X15-powered 2021 W900L took home yet another interior trophy, Overdrive readers lauding the custom-painted Rockwood floor and other mods throughout. Since the rig’s big 2022 Working Bobtail win, McCormick’s added the floor and more, including watermelon lights throughout the interior to complement plenty of bright work around the gauges and elsewhere along the dash and doors.
The floor itself pays homage to the rig’s overall inspiration — it’s painted after the Snowman character’s KW from the classic “Smokey & the Bandit” film — featuring a lyric from the Jerry Reed classic “Eastbound and Down” song featured in the flick.
“A long way to go” shown here on the driver side floor.
On the passenger side, then …
“…And a short time to get there!”
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When we caught up with McCormick a few weeks ago, after he learned of the big win, he was prepping for the typical slow period for his principally served customer in the area around his Robards, Kentucky, home. “They’re fixing to shut down here in about a week” for the Christmas holiday, he said. “They want all their silos empty before they shut down,” so he was hustling to move product out of the Henderson, Kentucky, facility down to Calvert City, his regular run.
He wasn’t going to be down himself, though, prepping as he was to take over his father’s own dedicated run while the elder McCormick, also leased to Oakley but serving a different customer between Calvert City and Louisville, took a vacation of his own.
“You’re going to get tired of writing about my truck,” he said with a chuckle when offered congrats for the big Pride & Polish interior win. Yet it’s well-deserved. And “it’s a pretty cool honor” to be chosen first by peers, he added.
View of the dash and steering wheel inside the truck, likewise the skull-topped shifter — christened “Leroy” after McCormick’s moniker for a fictional codriver he told tall tales of in his chicken-hauling days long ago.
McCormick told the story behind the truck attendant to his Working Bobtail win in 2022 — he bought it late in 2020 with the basics of the exterior paint job already on it. Working with the Kenworth dealer in Springfield, Missouri, who had the rig transferred up from Dallas, he took delivery of the truck late that year and got to work fitting it to his liking.
The “Bandit” name didn’t come immediately, though running the rig it wasn’t long before other drivers took notice of the paint scheme and called out to him on the CB, “Hey, it’s the Snowman,” and “There goes the Bandit!”
Bandit holds another meaning for McCormick, though, as it was the name of a Yorkie pup with coloring around his eyes like a black mask you might see on a raccoon. Bandit the dog would turn out to be “my little buddy through the years,” McCormick said, growing up in a past truck. As told in the 2022 story about the owner-operator’s W900L, John and his wife, Marilyn, pulled reefer trailers back then as a company driver team. (Marilyn’s since come off the road herself, many years ago now.)
Bandit “marked everything from Boston to L.A.,” McCormick said, over the 17 years of his life. The 2021 KW now serves as rolling memorial to his memory, likewise that of two other Yorkies, Sassy and Molly.
The pups’ names with this graphic are shown on the driver-side sleeper window.
Among mods McCormick’s made since the 2022 feature include the aforementioned watermelon lights throughout the cab and sleeper, plus a stainless flush-mount deck extending from the back of the sleeper and beyond the fifth wheel to the tail of the rig.
Here, two of those watermelons illuminate the space above the dash.
In addition to several spaced evenly overhead along the divider between cab and sleeper, this set of four serves the sleeper interior.
McCormick’s got “all kinds of plans for the truck,” he says, again with a chuckle. “I really need to stay off TikTok.” Yet all will be on hold until it’s fully paid off about a year from now. While year 2024 wasn’t bad from an income perspective, the owner-operator isn’t exactly in a financial position “to be spending a bunch of money” on purely aesthetic upgrades, he added.
Speaking two weeks shy of the end of the last year, he noted he’d moved more loads in 2024 than in all of 2023, yet he still looks to pre-2020 times for his economic-activity benchmark — a high-water mark in 2019 for his dedicated runs. That year, he moved in the neighborhood of 1,500 loads for the customer. This year and last, the total was closer to 1,000.
As are other owner-operators, he’s hopeful for freight picking up in the new year.
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At once, he did make one other relatively small investment in the truck’s award-winning interior in recent times. The custom-painted Rockwood floor — paint work done by an airbrush artist named “Chop” nearby to McCormick’s Robards, Kentucky, home base — is newly protected from damage by a custom floor mat.
Between the seats, just back from the shifter’s base, the rig’s moniker, “Bandit,” as painted by Chop.
McCormick commissioned Lightnin Jack Customs to build the floor mat to protect the original floor. “They normally do cigar boats and stuff,” he said, but “they got into truck floor mats. … The only part of the floor they don’t cover is behind the seats.”
Check out the results for yourself:
Between the seats, mimicking the painted floor underneath …
The full floor mat before install.
Catch John McCormick telling the tale of the truck as of 2022 in the Overdrive Radio podcast edition embedded below, likewise with scenes from our 2022 run in the Bandit in the video that follows it.
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