Mike Ryan, who has won the Pike’s Peak Hillclimb more times than I can count, is one crazy bastard. And I was the guy raising my hand to take a ride in that crazy Freightliner truck of his. I love him for it by the way and would hang out with this guy anytime. When I opened my big mouth on the mic at the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational last Saturday I just wanted to see the truck run around the track. Mike said hell yeah we’ll run it if the track will let us, and then informed me that there was in fact a passenger seat in this beast. No self respecting BangShifter would miss this opportunity, so I threw on some gear and climbed on up.

After calling Brian to let him know that it was okay for him to hate me since I was getting this ride, it was on. The truck makes 2500 plus horsepower and over 4000 lb. ft. of torque. It weighs almost 10,000 pounds and is as nimble as a new Camaro. Seriously. Bad bad ass truck. Mike throws the thing around like a champ, and since he hadn’t been around this track in a few years I was giving him directions like a World Rally Championship navigator until he got the track down. We were trying to drift a lot of the course, but had one lap that was just for recon and to test the surface with a couple drifts. The truck ran the course in 2 minutes and 3 seconds on that lap. That’s fast. On a clean no drifting lap there is NO doubt this truck runs mid 1 minute 50 second laps. That’s faster than a ton of the cars in competition.

What’s it like riding 5 feet in the air at well over 100mph sideways? Surprisingly calm actually. The truck does what you tell it, shoves you into your seat like a ZR1 Camaro, and smokes tires at will. I love it. I want one. I want to drive it up Pikes Peak. Every time you go at a corner, and apex markers, I’m thinking we are going to run off track and kill the cones. But no, the perspective is so wrong, but Mike knows right where the corners are. His control of this thing is truly amazing. Every time it’s super sideways you think it is going to spin, but the damn thing pulls it off thanks to a ton of steering angle. It just shouldn’t be able to do what it does. No way. It makes no sense, until you really start looking at all the parts and engineering in this crazy Freightliner. And did I mention that NOTHING and I mean NOTHING on the planet does better burnouts.