If you follow the sport of drag racing at all you know that for the last decade or so, the biggest trend has been toward “small tire” drag racing. Typically this means we’re talking about radial tire equipped cars. Back in the day it was 10.5 tires that started the trend and then it has gone more shrimpy from there. Apparently back in the 1990s the Bigfoot group was thinking that this could be a thing in monster trucks so they bolted a set of 48″ tires on Bigfoot 8 and let it rip at their test location. The result? Pretty interesting actually. If you think about the implications of taking away 18″ of tire diameter and scads of weight you can start to see what they were thinking.
The truck is rocket ship fast and that is one of the first things we’re sure that got the drivers’ attention. The acceleration and “gaining” all that gear ratio with the short tire had to have really made the truck snappy. The massive weight reduction probably made it fly better off the jump as well. You’ll see a man who looks to be Jim Kramer giving the truck a cursory inspection after the first few rips is makes back and forth and over the jump.
There’s a bit of a high speed section where it seems they are testing the cornering/maneuverability of the truck with the smaller tires and that’s when you really get a sense for the speed the rig is generating. Finally, is it just us or does this engine sound so sexy crisp that you want to just attach your ear to it? We love all of this.
