There are pickup trucks, and then there are trophy trucks. The former is what you’d drive to Home Depot when you need to pick up plywood; a Ford F-150, a Chevrolet Colorado, or a Toyota Tacoma, for example. The latter is what you’d drive through Baja California at neck-snapping speeds in a bid to leave the competition in the dust and take first place on the podium. Putting a trophy truck on a go-kart track is kind of like stuffing a bear in a hamster wheel, but that didn’t stop racer Carl Renezeder from giving it a shot.
In one of those “don’t try this at home” moments, the owners of K1 Speed let Renezeder drive his truck onto one of their tracks in California. He was alone, of course, no go-kart racers were harmed during the making of the video. The truck in question is entirely custom-made, it’s not based on an existing model you can buy new from a dealership. It’s powered by a big V8 engine tuned to send 850 horsepower to the rear wheels, and it tips the scale at a little over 4,200 pounds. In short, it’s the exact opposite of a go-kart.
Renezeder — a nine-time off-road champion — nonetheless manages to make his way around the track at an admirable pace, drifting around corners like he’s in the desert and going flat-out on the straight parts. That’s easier said than done in a truck that looks like it’s wider than a Hummer. The video doesn’t show a full lap, unfortunately, so we’re not entirely ruling out the possibility that the stunt took several tries to get right, and the early attempts led to the untimely demise of a few guardrails and a couple of rims.
We hope the footage of Renezeder’s truck tearing through a go-kart track will inspire a go-kart racer — better yet, a group of go-kart racers — to tackle a trophy truck course, film it, and upload the video to YouTube. That would be equally awesome; we suspect the end result would look a lot like a real-life replica of Wario Stadium in Mario Kart 64. Who’s up for it?
