World’s Fastest Toyota Hilux Tops 400 km/h [w/video] 

If you can believe it, the world’s fastest Toyota Hilux tops 400 km/h at the recent Bonneville Speed Week speed trial held on the famous salt pan in Utah. In South Africa we have that old adage, nothing’s faster than a Mk1 Golf, but this Hilux has just taken that claim away, giving endless bragging rights to Toyota fans all over SA, especially over their friendly foes in Ford Rangers.

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A Tried and Trusted Recipe

We’ve covered this bakkie before, as you can see at this link. But we’ll recap for those too lazy or busy to click through. Owner Scott Birdsall and his team had the idea to build a truck to compete at Bonneville Speed Week. They wanted to compete in the stock-body class at the famous top-speed event. As a result, the body remained but original engine was replaced by a tuner favourite: a 2JZ-GTE. The engine, however, is far from standard.

It now displace 3,2-litres up from 3,0. The upgrades include a race ported head, uprated coils, 12 injectors and a Iron Eagle short block sub-assembly. A Garrett G47 turbocharger forces 2,2 bars of boost pressure (for now) into the straight-six motor. The massive snail can produce up to 3,3 bars of pressure. Peka power of the recent run was about 820 kW (or 1 100 hp in old money). Scott says there’s about 600 hp (450 kW) still sitting in reserve in the massively modded 2J. A six-speed sequential transmission sends all of that power to the rear axle.

Click here to check out a cool little Merc restomod bakkie that has an AMG heart.

Hitting the Salt

Birdsall had previously tested at events leading up to the attack on the salt pan. He reached a top speed of 280 km/h at a half-mile (800 m) event in Texas. The course at Bonneville is over 11 km long, so there was plenty of room for improvement on that speed. Oh boy did it improve. The crew cab Hilux managed a top speed of 403,63 km/h (250,81 mph) at the Bonneville event that took place this last week. His two-way average was 384,96 km/h.

Birdsall said on his YouTube channel: “This run should have been 260+ (mph) but unfortunately, I had some brain fade and shifted to 6th immediately after I shifted to 5th. This wasted an entire mile of acceleration. The eventual goal for this truck is to become the fastest truck of any class at Bonneville. We think the truck is capable of 270+. We found that the safe limit for the ‘chute was around 230, so there will be a longer main chute lanyard for the next passes. Sideways at 200+ is a party lol.”

Watch as the world’s fastest Toyota Hilux tops 400 km/h in the video below, watch until the very end for the massive slide that Birdsall manages to catch when his parachute started to flail around. He could also have, inadvertently, set the world record for the fastest drift…