When my dad was hauling cross-country, he loved to imply that whatever car of the week I was obsessed over was peanuts compared to the Kenworth he was wheeling around. I’m not going to say he was wrong…certainly, in the early 1990s, he had a point…but you don’t automatically look at a Freightliner, a Mack, or any other big rig and immediately picture power incomprehensible. You picture torque for days, sure, but you also picture that torque moving a trailer so loaded down that inclines automatically mean merge right, throw on the hazards and shift down until the gear holds. Bob-tailing is one thing, but your typical Class 8 isn’t going to set the world on fire with what it can do. It’s a workhorse, plain and simple. It’s meant to go for miles without trouble, haul tons of freight, and offer enough room for a driver to be comfortable.

But if you’ve been around BangShift long enough, you know that there is a culture of diesel tuners that go for these big rigs. Thirteen-second quarter mile slips in your Mustang ain’t squat, but in a Kenworth, that’s something to behold. Now, imagine a monster like that hooked to a sled and that’s what we are bringing you. Two classes of trucks, Street Semi (plated, DOT legal) and Hot Rod Semi (full send class) took to the sled in Virginia. What do we learn from this? Well, nothing we didn’t already know: a semi truck has grunt to move the trailer a good distance, and that there are enough Mack Super-Liner fans out there that know how to make the 998 cubic inches of Mack E9 V8 diesel scream like none other. One in particular could probably drag the pulling sled all the way home if it wasn’t for the dirt surface!