If you don’t follow the world of off-road racing you may not be as familiar with the famed Terrible Herbst Truggy. This thing was a completely bombshell when it debuted and it continues to be a tour de force in the world of racing today…or at least it did before a massive fire at the 2016 NORRA 1000. This thing showed up in the 1990s and destroyed trophy trucks, buggies, and every established notion about what the “right way” was to build and off-road truck.
The truck has been named to lots of lists denoting the best off-road trucks of all time and it has earned every inch of it. Thankfully before the fire (which we are hoping that they rebuild from) the guys at Mad Media had the chance to put the latest version of the rig (called El Tiburon) was driven into a photo studio and they pounced, creating this amazing video which some would call car or truck porn. Because it has one of the classiest songs of all time “I Only Have Eyes For You” playing the whole time, we’re not going that far, but what we are going to say is that you can really tell when guys who get it have a video camera and make art like this. It rules.
We’re sad that there was the big NORRA 1000 fire, but we’re glad that this video got made before that calamity and it can serve as a record of the machine in the ultimate state of its original form. The Terribe Herbst Truggy is dead. Long live the Terrible Herbst Truggy.
I was in the race car at NORRA waiting to start the stage when the race was delayed because of the fire. We waited and waited before someone finally told us a truck was on fire and that it had caught a field on fire. But we didn’t know which truck. They moved the race down the road to bypass it. Right as we were lining up to start again we saw it come out on a trailer. Man it was a bummer.
We talked to the crew chief later down there and the ultimate cause was a small fire that would have been totally manageable normally caught the lithium ion battery in the cordless impact to catch fire and then it was game over.