You might think that many years of professional dirt bike racing and managing Motocross and Supercross teams at the top echelon would be a tough gig to follow, but Troy Carroll has made the transition from managing two-wheelers to 22-wheelers like a duck to water, reckons, Paul Matthei.
Troy Carroll has been messing around with a variety of vehicles ranging from motorcycles to trucks all his life.
“As a professional Motocross and Supercross rider I managed to win 24 Australian Championships and represented Australia several times at international events,” says Troy. “When I retired from racing in 2010, I started managing the NPS Monster Energy Kawasaki racing team.
“We mostly had two riders, and at one stage three, and were travelling all over Australia during the racing season then travelling to the USA for training during the off season.”
He did this for a total of seven years until 2017 when he decided to hang up the riding boots and pursue an entirely different career.
“It got to the stage where I was simply burnt out from all the travelling and I knew I had to walk away from it,” Troy says. “The hardest part was being away from my wife and kids; even when they were travelling with me, most days I was away from six in the morning to six or seven at night.”
Troy explains that he knew it was time to quit during his last season of the Supercross in 2017 which went for six or seven rounds.
“I was basically hiding away in the transporter and not coming out until the guys raced, I just didn’t want to be there and that’s when I knew for sure that it was over. When Kawasaki asked me to renew the contract, I had to tell them I was out.”
Troy subsequently sold all the equipment including the race transporter semi-trailer, but somewhat fortuitously something made him hang onto the prime mover, a black Freightliner Argosy.
Perhaps this was partly due to the fact that his father Vince had worked in the trucking industry for over 40 years, meaning trucks were in the blood.
“The prime mover was sitting there and one of my mates suggested I get hold of a trailer and start delivering for him,” Troy says. “I basically got my semi license the day before I left, and my first trip was from Brisbane out to a mining company’s site at Roma Logistics Hub in central Queensland.”
This was the start of a very steep learning curve for Troy that four years down the track sees him at the helm of his very own trucking company, Carroll Group Australia.
“When I started driving, I didn’t know anything about things like Basic Fatigue Management (BFM) or Chain of Responsibility (CoR), but I have certainly learnt all about these regulations and the many others since then,” Troy says, adding that it was quite a shift going from being the hero of a sport to driving a truck.
However, he soon realised that if he kept driving it would mean lots of time away from his family, the very reason he had left the Motocross world behind.
“I started driving in November 2017 and then in January 2018 I put a driver in the truck while I took my family and parents away for a big holiday in Singapore and Thailand,” Troy says. “And I thought, ‘how good’s this, I’m making money while I’m away on holidays’.
“So when I came back I decided to shift things up a gear and started doing courses to learn everything I needed to know about running a trucking business.”
Troy adds that keeping up with compliance has become a huge thing for the company – which prides itself on maintaining the highest possible standards in safety and compliance.
“This goes hand-in-hand with the type of work in which we specialise; that is general freight going to mining and gas exploration companies where safety and compliance are of the highest order,” he says.
