When I first watched this video and saw that the sleeper truck in question was running at New England Dragway I was a little shocked. Why? Well pretty much every Mighty Max truck ever delivered to the greater New England area began rusting the second it touched the ground and has long since disappeared. This tan model is in damned fine shape and the unassuming color well matches its sleeper status. If you showed me a photo of this thing and asked me to predict what it would run I’d guess 15s on a good day or maybe slower. Instead the truck has been a developing project for years in in this video you will see it run 10s with a turbo four engine.
Ahhhh! You all thought I was going to say something about an LS or other V8 swap but you are wrong. This truck is all Mistubishi with a legendary 4G63 four holer under the hood. The 4G63 has been an amazingly versatile engine for Mitsubishi and believe it or not, with this truck in the mid to high 10s the engine is on the milder side. There are guys running these engines far more ragged than this but see the license plates? Yea, blowing this one up is going to leave someone stranded by the side of a road. A full on kill tune up would be cool but if the truck can crank off 10-second elapsed times and run around town reliably, who’s to complain? Not us!
Sure, some will scoff at the fact that the truck has a little 2.0L (or thereabouts) four cylinder in it but when you think about all the stuff that the 4G63 has accomplished in motorsports, the millions of them that have been produced and the enormous power potential, it would be kind of lame to jam anything else under the hood. Hell, we just watched Mike Reichen push his EVO 2 over 216mph last weekend at the Ohio Mile with one of these engines and that maniac has been 237 before! Power is power, it doesn’t care what the valve cover says.
This is a cool sleeper truck and we think it could clean up on a grudge night and it could easily blow the doors off any pesky Camaro, Mustang, Corvette, Challenger driver who wanted to try and out muscle it at the stoplight drags as well. Slapper bars and all!
Christ almighty that’s a sleeper’s sleeper! Can someone clarify how he bangs those shifts off in what seems like a microsecond? This IS BangShift after all – I can’t get my head around how a transmission can be shifted at redline seemingly without benefit of the clutch …
That is because it’s an automatic transmission not a standard.
I had *no idea* that there was a Mitsubishi slushbox that could handle that kind of abuse.
Tens with no roll bar? I’m going out on a limb here but I thought the quickest you could run without a bar was 11.00. Legal or not, I think it would make sense.
You can make a 10 second pass at a strip with no bar…once.
What amazes me the most isn’t the fact that for once somebody had the imagination not to go down the usual swap in an LS route but that one of these trucks actually exists in almost pristine condition and hasn’t rusted away after three days. Unless these are still being made and sold in the USA these days…
My nephew has a ’91 Mighty Max with a dead 4G64. One of those “It would be so tempting if I had the time and money” things…