A big, heavy truck might not be the most obvious vehicle to choose to turn into a dedicated drag racing machine, but that hasn’t stopped one Canadian making his Dodge Ram Rumble Bee demolish quarter mile faster than a Bugatti Chiron.
Car & Driver recorded a 9.4-second quarter mile for the Bugatti early last year, which made it fractionally quicker than the Andrew Makkinga’s previous best of 9.57 seconds for his heavily modified Rumble Bee. But on a recent trip south of the border he took over half a second out of that PB, crossing the finish line in 8.96 seconds at 151.48 mph (243.78 km/h).
The Rumble Bee was a limited edition version of the short bed Dodge Ram 1500 produced between 2004 and 2005. Available only in yellow with a black bumble bee tail stripe like the one fitted to Dodge’s late 1960s Super Bee muscle car, or black paint with a yellow version of the same graphics, the Rumble Bee was fitted with Chrysler’s 5.7-liter Hemi that made a healthy 345 hp and 375 lb-ft of torque.
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Makkinga bought his car new when he was 18 years old and began adding some simple bolt-on mods. But two decades later, things have definitely gotten out of hand. Now the Ram runs a twin-turbo 461-cube (7.6-liter) V8 hooked up to a Turbo 400 automatic transmission and a stout Dana 60 rear end.
Previous videos on his own Hemi North YouTube channel show the car achieving a 10.38-second quarter mile time a few years back when the Bee was configured with a supercharged and NOS-injected 438 cu-in (7.2-liter) V8 driving the rear wheels through a Tremec T56 manual transmission.
Even that timing slip is impressive going for a machine this size, but as far as we know the only production car capable of beating the truck with its new sub-9-second setup is the $2.4 million, 1914 hp (1940 PS) Rimac Nevera electric hypercar, which can do the job in 8.6 seconds.