Hot Rod Haulers! Place Your Bets Between The 1UZ-Powered Flatbed And the 1JZ-Powered Van!


Hot Rod Haulers! Place Your Bets Between The 1UZ-Powered Flatbed And the 1JZ-Powered Van!

A Mazda flatbed truck and a Mitsubishi L300 van. I’ll take “Vehicles You’d Never See On A Dragstrip” for a thousand, Alex. Small, compact utility vehicles from Japan don’t conjure up images of speed. Not at all. These are, at best, shop vehicles…you’d haul parts or an engine around with either rig and be just fine, yeah. But powerful? Both of these beasts of burden made do with a list of gasoline and diesel four-bangers for their motivation, none of which were really anything to write home about. They would do what you needed them to do, and as long as you gave enough of a crap to change the oil once in a while, would run forever.

What you will see these two things do is akin to watching a well-worn Chevy Express with a Duramax swap rip away from a Camaro. This Mazda flatbed has been 1UZ swapped, so instead of a rattly four-banger, the silken V8 that Lexus shoved into just about everything will be moving the tiny tray with headlights along. The Mitsubishi is even more wicked…it’s sporting a Toyota-sourced engine, too, but here it’s a 1JZ inline-six like you’d find in a late 1980s Supra. On the outside, neither rig looks like anything special, but the exhaust notes tell you everything you need to know. Which one do you like more?


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4 thoughts on “Hot Rod Haulers! Place Your Bets Between The 1UZ-Powered Flatbed And the 1JZ-Powered Van!

  1. RK - no relation

    Ever since I saw the Twisted Corona in Hot Rod’s Dare to be Different feature, I dig the V8. Especially when it’s in the family tree

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