A dug out trench that looks more like an evaporation pit than anything even remotely close to natural and a bunch of mega trucks nearby can only mean one thing: the bounty mud hole is open for business. Designed to be the final say in sloppy, frame-sucking, momentum-killing mud, the goal is simple: make it to the other side without having to yell at the dude in the trackhoe to save your sorry ass from a man-made quicksand pit that has eaten your rig. Try all you want. Bring stupid levels of horsepower, hit it fast, hit it slow…do whatever you want, but we bet that the winner is going to be sitting on a pair of metal tracks, driven by the most amused person at the show. It’s kind of like fishing to that guy, really.
Then this little box-thing shows up. What you’re looking at is the SHERP, a Russian-built ATV that can swim and drive over just about whatever the hell it wants to, even with 44 horsepower from a Kubota four-banger turbodiesel doing it’s best to crank those wheels over. Drive it like a tank and don’t do a backflip and you’ll be the master of anything you can drive it through. We bet there were a lot of salty mega-truck owners after this little stunt went down!
That SHERP is a totally different approach from the mega trucks – minimal weight and just enough power to keep the tires spinning. This pit seems to punish too much weight and careless application of horsepower, while the SHERP just floated through it.