Muscle trucks: Here are 7 of the fastest pickups of all-time - Driving
Actually, make that party up front, too: this pickup/car hybrid has a 7. 4-litre Chevy big-block shoehorned under the nose. This gargantuan engine – what you’d call the “big stove” option – was rated in the neighbourhood of 450 horsepower, but was actually rumoured to crank out north of 500 hp. This meant the El Camino could really “andale. ” Even though there wasn’t much weight over the rear when the box was unladen, quarter-mile times were reportedly in the low 13 seconds, right out of the box. There were various other hot rod versions of the El Camino, but the 1970 version was the bookend for this type of lunacy. We’d like to think the spirit of the car is carried by the Australia-only Holden Utes, which can still be optioned with major Chevy V8 power. In the late 1970s, the fastest-accelerating American car wasn’t a car. The Lil’ Red Express Truck was built off the short-wheelbase Dodge D150 half-ton pickup, and owed its existence to some clever wriggling through a loophole in the restrictive EPA regulations. Under the law, engines which had already been certified could be lightly modified, so Dodge’s engineers went all out, beefing up the valve springs, reworking exhaust and intake, and swapping out the heads for better flowing ones. The police-spec 360 cubic inch (5. 9L) V8 also had a police-spec cam shaft, and didn’t have to run with a catalytic converter. Source: driving.ca
