How fast can a NASCAR truck get down the drag strip?
Racing vehicles are always evolving, becoming ever-more highly specialized weapons of speed. So what happens when you take one of those weapons and put it in an arena outside its intended purpose? YouTube channel Cleetus McFarland put on a show for us to find out, with a fire-breathing NASCAR truck taking to the drag strip for a few flat-out passes.
With a set of drag radials mounted, the truck rips off a couple 11-second shakedown passes (including one where the driver accidentally rips off the shift knob shifting into second) before the nitrous kit is activated and the E.T.s start dropping. The final rip of the night is a 9.98-second pass, not too shabby for a chassis originally designed to turn left only.
When Cleetus McFarland frontman Garrett Mitchell bought the truck in 2018, it was lacking the NASCAR-spec small-block and four-speed, instead sporting an LS1 and T56 five-speed likely pulled from a fourth-generation Camaro. At the time, the truck also had one particularly interesting quirk: a street title. The project took several unexpected turns since arriving in the Cleetus McFarland family, including broken and replaced rear axles, a rebuilt transmission, and a new engine. Currently, the truck has been tuned to a more neutral chassis setup, and a nitrous-fed 427-cube LS3 now resides under the hood. According to the video, the monster motor recorded 890 hp on a recent dyno test.
There are some asterisks to note here, however. The first and most obvious to NASCAR faithful, is that despite how cool the Dale Earnhardt Sr. livery is here, Sr. never ran a NASCAR trucks series race. The graphics might be fake, but the truck under it claims to be legit. The chassis was supposedly built for Dave Marcis by Richard Childress Racing, but after that the details get a little murky. There are two different narratives circulating online, the first being that this race chassis had its one and only competition experience on track at Phoenix Raceway on October 28, 1995. Other reports suggest the vehicle never turned a lap on track.
Either way, this rubber-roasting race truck is a sight to behold and clearly a drag-strip terror.
