Team Gordon Toyota Tundra

Beyond comprehension. There's no other way to describe how the Team Gordon Toyota Tundra SCORE Trophy Truck shaves down Hereford-size bumps and spackles in bottomless ravines.

CART race winner, desert champion, and certifiable wildman Robby Gordon took me for a ride in his truck down a rutted desert path that looked like an ocean frozen in mid-storm. At times, the digital speedometer on my side topped 100 mph. Then, we approached a particularly deep crevasse. I closed my eyes and whimpered, "This is going to hurt." The fact that I was sitting to the right of Gordon, who's crashed a wider variety of race cars than any active driver, did nothing to allay my fears. But the landing was no rougher than-perhaps not as rough as-running over a speed bump in a Lexus LS 400. Jumps had a cartoonish feel: Instead of being splattered against a sheer cliff, the truck settles gently, as if cushioned by a boatload of Acme pillows. Though it weighs a hefty 4600 pounds, the Team Gordon Tundra lands like an alley cat jumping off a fence. My own flinches hurt more than the bumps.

If you drove the most off-road-capable roadgoing sport/utility vehicle or truck down the same ravine-pleated path at half the speed, both the truck and your spine would be destroyed in a matter of feet, likely by the first bump. But Gordon's truck is more closely related to his Swift-Toyota CART FedEx Champ car than a roadgoing Tundra pickup.

Trophy Truck rules say that, if you bolt a stock grille to something that looks like a pickup (squinting and double shots of tequila are permitted), pretty much anything else goes. Another rule requires the use of a stock engine block and cylinder heads, but these pieces can come from any vehicle in the manufacturer's line.

Team Gordon designed and built its truck from the wheels up, starting with little more than a pile of tube steel and some carbon-fiber and Kevlar sheeting. That stock grille was one of the few pieces Team Gordon didn't construct from scratch.

"We're not just reinventing the wheel, we're fabricating it, too," said Gordon.

Certainly the single largest piece not made by Team Gordon is the 500-horsepower Lexus LX 470-based, aluminum-block-and-head DOHC V-8. This potent mill, built by Toyota Racing Development, is mounted behind the driver, which increases rear-weight bias and frees up the underhood area for the biggest unequal-length control arms in captivity. These tubular A-arms meet in the middle of the truck: To be any longer than the current 34 inches, the truck would have to be wider. The area reserved for the bed in a stock truck is, save for the engine, totally occupied by the suspension: a live axle located by both Winston Cup-style parallel truck arms and trailing links in the shape of a V attached to the top of the differential.

The Team Gordon-designed coil-over shocks look as if they were deemed too big for the landing gear on a C-141 Starlifter. Each carries 1.5 gallons of oil, including that in the attached reservoir, under 800 psi of gas pressure. The shocks' shafts are a gargantuan 131/48 inches in diameter-nearly as thick as the entire unit in some road cars. These behemoths give the truck a giant 28 inches of suspension travel up front and a stunning 38 inches in the rear. To show how truly huge that is: A stock Tundra has just 7.4 inches up front, 8.9 inches in the rear. This isn't a truck, but rather a suspension system with an engine.

The chassis is a tube-frame affair, not dissimilar to a Winston Cup car. An 80-gallon Indy car-like fuel cell is mounted behind the driver: There's a 3-inch ride-height difference between full and empty.

To increase rear-weight bias to 57 percent so the truck flies nose high off bumps (nose low translates into a big crash), the engine is turned 180 degrees from its conventional position: This puts the lighter tranny forward. A meshed-gear drive off the Gordon-modified five-speed Weismann transmission reroutes power to the rear axle.