Awesome NASCAR-Powered Ford Rat Rod Land Speed Truck
Rat rods are all the rage these days, and for good reason. They’re simply badass, but not many of these hot rods are designed for the purpose of setting a land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats. This truck, called The Untouchable, is designed for that purpose, and it has a ton of NASCAR engineering involved.
Aaron Brown spent years in NASCAR building cup car race cars, but decided he’d rather build and maintain hot rods. So he opened up a shop. Around that time, the straight-line bug also bit him, and decided he wanted to build a vehicle capable of setting a record on the salt while still being daily-drivable. That’s how The Untouchable came about.
Built around the body of a Ford pickup, it uses stock car tube frame chassis and a NASCAR truck-arm rear suspension. It’s even powered by a Yates-style V8 that probably was in a stock car in the 1990s. When it was put into this truck, it made 715 horsepower to the rear wheels on the dyno.
Since it is based around the idea of second hand parts and running moonshine, the truck obviously needed to be a rat rod. Most of the parts are second hand, except the transmission. Even the rear wing, designed to keep the truck on the ground at 190 mph, was a second hand component.
At the Ohio Mile it reached 197 miles per hour, but Brown thinks there’s more in it when a few things get ironed out. Unfortunately, we don’t know how fast it’ll do the mile at Bonneville, because weather prevented this year’s running. The truck will be at SEMA, and expect it to make a run for the record in 2016 on the famed salt flats.
What do you think? Let us know over in the forums!
via [Hot Rod]
