This Is What Too Much Horsepower Looks Like

You may know that the El Camino style car-with-truck-bed ("ute") is the unofficial national vehicle of Australia. It's common to see Ford and GM variants dialed in for huge performance. It's not common to see a Suzuki Mighty Boy at all, let alone one this... angry.

Look at it twirl!

As you can see the Mighty Boy was barely a car, let alone a truck. With a curb weight of around 1,200 pounds and a 543cc engine, modest by motorcycle standards, I don't think it set too many heavy hauling records.

But it did have its fans! Australia's Modern Motor described the driving experience as an "awful ride on anything less than perfect roads" in 1985. Actually their review did go on to give it some props:

"But fun to drive... well, yes, sometimes, in the city, when the pedestrians are smiling down at you as they read the Mighty Boy badges. Or when you find a perfectly smooth, ideally cambered series of downhill bends and you do a version of Ayrton Senna in his karting days and amaze drivers of normal width cars. With just 1395mm width door handle to door handle, even a comparatively narrow road is wide in this little number."

You've got to appreciate an auto writer for having the balls to work a Senna reference into a story about what was essentially a garden implement.

Unfortunately it doesn't sound like Modern Motor's sterling review or the claim-to-fame as "Australia's cheapest car" did much for the Mighty Boy's popularity, as some 3,000 examples were said to have been shipped Down Under with only a few hundred supposedly left today.

At least this little monster is doing the badge proud.

Australia's Street Machine says this particular car is run by a Mr. Mark McTiernan, who bought it off builder Matthew Sultana. The three-cylinder weedwacker under the hood was swapped for a 5.7 liter LS1 V8 cooked up to a Turbo 400 transmission and a nine-inch rear differential.

The result is, well, it's just a few thin strips of metal from being an enormous engine attached to four wheels. Automotive performance at its purest.

Hat tip to Ross!