Everybody always says the same thing about NASCAR race vehicles: “I wish it was like back in the day, when teams used real cars for race cars.” That’s a fair shot at what is now the Monster Energy series, but what about what started life as the Craftsman Truck series? They were silhouette racers from the get-go, though in the mid-1990s, when the series kicked off, there was no question which truck was a Ford, Chevy, or Dodge. They looked so close to the street version that thirteen-year-old McTaggart wondered just how difficult it would be to take one of the trucks he watched on Speedvision and to get it to a street-legal level. It might not be the real truck turned into a race car, but having a race truck converted for street duty could be just that much cooler.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought of this. What you’re looking at is, according to it’s Florida title, a 2000 Ford pickup truck. What you’re really looking at is a race machine with a 1997-ish Ford F-150 body on it that has been made street legal enough to earn it’s license plates. Sorry to all of the Blue Oval fans, but that’s a 355ci Chevrolet mill underneath the hood, backed by a Muncie four-gear. You get two Kirkey racing seats, air conditioning, and power windows in the functional doors (!) yet you retain the 22 gallon fuel cell, the Speedway exhaust, and the feeling that you are committing several felonies just by starting this beast up and driving out onto the side roads.

Was the truck really raced? We don’t know if it was…but we can promise that it would be.

RacingJunk.com Link: “2000 Ford Pickup”