I first encountered a garden tractor when I was eight. Up until that point, everybody had the typical gas-powered push mower, except for the one time my dad borrowed a fancy powered push mower…it practically drove itself, as long as you held onto the bar. But when I moved houses to one further out in the Illinois country and had acreage, no push mower was going to work out. Hence, the alternative to the go-kart: the riding tractor. Smartly, the people I was living with didn’t allow me to do anything more than to sit in the seat with no key in the ignition. I doubt that anybody warned those people about my self-taught driving skill. But you know how little kids are…stick a gearhead in the making behind a wheel and race-car noises are bound to follow. Even today as an adult, the lawn tractor is a source of happiness for me. It’s the one item on the “honey-do” list that I look forward to. Two hours on the riding tractor putting around my lawn with some music playing? Oh, twist my arm, please. My 12-horse Craftsman is all I need to chop down the onions and other grass-like plants that compose my “yard”, and it’s only when the further part of my backyard gets really tall that I call in my father-in-law’s small John Deere tractor with the mower deck.

Now, at some point in time, I’ll look at the Craftsman and wonder what it’d be like with 100 horsepower. Give me a good four-banger and a setup that will allow me to run the PTO drives like normal and that two-hour mow job might be knocked down to a few minutes. But then you hear about people who take it just a step or two too far, and that’s what we have here. The description says, “V8 Mercury with turbo from Pontiac Trans Am”. If that is a Mercury block, that’d be based on the L31 350ci small-block Chevrolet engine, though we wonder if it is an older design. The turbocharger is a full-on crapshoot, though we are guessing it’s off a third-gen GTA instead of the Turbo Trans Am’s 301. It could be a 301 Pontiac, though, and it would still be more than enough to make you soil your shorts the moment you think you’ve got what it takes to go WFO on this contraption. Even the dual rear rolling stock isn’t going to save your hide from what will happen next. It runs, it drives, and it will have your neighbors questioning every bit of your sanity as you cross your backyard on the back tires at quarter-throttle and good speed.

Got a true deathwish?

Facebook Marketplace link: Turbocharged V8-powered lawn tractor