By Greg Kachadurian
If you’re old enough to remember seeing SVT Lightnings on the road, you’re also old enough to remember seeing ratty bootleg clones of SVT Lightnings. Cloning one wasn’t very hard to do. Find a knockoff Lightning bumper for a hundred bucks on eBay and maybe consider painting it. Get the chrome taillights from your local AutoZone and the shiniest chrome side pipe from the next aisle over. Then just cut the springs and you’ve basically got a Lightning that nobody will ever be suspicious of.
The lads at Hoonigan put just a little more effort than that into theirs. The project that I suppose is officially called Lord Frightening or Faux Lightning was born out of a need for a shop truck. Most people will just grab an ex-rental Ranger or Frontier off an auction lot for something like this. Hoonigan instead chose to find the most beat up single cab short bed F-150 imaginable and turn it into a Fast & Furious-inspired, JDM-infused race truck… that can also haul parts. They collaborated with Cody Walker, brother of Paul Walker, to build their own version of the Racer’s Edge Lightning from the first movie. You know the one.
They have a highly entertaining four-part build series up on YouTube which wrapped up today. Part four gives a brief overview of the condition of the truck when they began and what all has been done to it since. But today’s finished product just looks absolutely killer. It’s a very unusual mashup of parts but somehow it just works. It’s one of the more interesting projects I’ve seen recently and reminds me of how great a sport truck can be. Check out the video below for the [almost] end result but I recommend the whole series. Part one is available here as well.
And that intro shot is just *kisses fingers in Italian*.
Jeff Glucker
Very cool and unconventional build. I like it when builders stray from the typical LS/Coyote swaps, though I think this one would have been cooler with a flat-plane crank Voodoo under the hood. However, that would have been pricey and somewhat outside of the Hoonigan wheelhouse.
Too bad they started with my least-favorite F-100/F-150 body style of all time. Too much Ford Taurus influence going on. The bed fenders look like melted taffy.
I’ll say this much – more than 20 years out, the blobby styling is at least endearing both as a product of its time, and as a missed divergent branch of truck evolution before everyone caught on to the ’94 Ram’s precedent that bigger, butcher, and angrier was better.
I find myself more interested in Craigslist ads for early-80s compact trucks that were smaller, humbler, and rather cheerful looking.
As the owner of a 2002 F150 I actually like the “aero” look as less threatening and easier to load stuff into. Mine is also 4×2 with an 8′ box so it looks like a lowrider next to a modern short bed 4×4.