One of the many great things about building your own Restomod offroad prerunner is you get to use whatever parts and pieces you want. For example, let’s say you’re using a 1969 Ford F-100 as the bodywork and a Chevy LS motor to provide the power. For some of you, this might be blasphemous to have a Chevy motor in a Ford anything. But if you follow motorsports at all, especially offroad racing, you know it’s actually fairly common thanks to the dependability, performance, and cost of the many different LS crate motors.
What you end up with if you go this route, might be the most badass Ford F-100 on the planet and this particular example belongs to Chris Isenhouer. It started as a regular old 1969 F-100 but as you can see there’s very little remaining from that original truck. This thing has been given the works from top to bottom by a combined effort of HRT Motorsports and Isenhouer Racing. We caught a glimpse of this truck in a short 50-second video of it jumping and I’ve been on a mission to find out as much as I can about it ever since.
Here’s what I know so far; the front suspension is estimated to have roughly 24 inches of travel thanks to the HRT center-mount A-arm system and thanks to a custom built 4-link it has roughly 29 inches in the rear. The shocks are from Sway-A-Way, although I couldn’t find what size they are. For the tires, he used 39 inch BF Goodrich Baja T/A’s all around which are commonly used on trophy trucks and other off-road vehicles. The wheels are full beadlocks on all four corner.
As we mentioned before, providing the power is an LS motor, specifically a 408 Stroker that was built by James Mullenih. I tried locating estimated power output but couldn’t find anything reliable. But just from listening to it we can safely assume its over 500hp and most likely up around the trophy truck range of 700-1000hp. As with most offroad desert trucks, all of the power is sent to the rear wheels only, which might come as a shock to some people who aren’t super familiar with this style of offroading. I include myself in that category because you would assume being an “offroad” race truck it must have four wheel drive. Nope. There have been a few Trophy Trucks out there competing with a four-wheel drive system but it’s yet to become mainstream both because of weight and the extra potential of things breaking.
Apparently Chris has used this truck for a few races in the 2016 season but the team was plagued with bad luck for a great majority of it. However, they do have big plans for the 2017 season to make a comeback and put this truck on the map. We look forward to seeing more of this super sick Ford in the coming year! If you have any more information regarding the details of the build contact us or leave a comment below. In the meantime check out a few teasers of the old girl in action.
Photo: photobucket