Hennessey Mammoth 1000 TRX
Climb aboard what is claimed to be the world’s most powerful and fastest-accelerating pickup
THIS IS THE HENNESSEY MAMMOTH 1000 TRX. ‘Mammoth’ because, well, it’s a big hairy beast, ‘1000’ because it has 1000bhp and near-as-dammit 1000lb ft of torque, and ‘TRX’ (T-rex, geddit?) because it’s based on Dodge’s hottest Hellcat-powered Ram TRX 1500 pickup.
As an evo reader, you’ll know the Hennessey name from more than three decades of tuning muscle cars and pickup trucks from its base in Sealy, Texas. Not forgetting the Venom GT and Venom F5 hypercars – the former being one of the most exciting cars I’ve ever driven, and the latter being one of the handful of wildly fast and powerful cars targeting a V-max of more than 300mph.
The Mammoth 1000 is the latest monster to leave Hennessey’s workshops. With 1012bhp and 969lb ft, this 3-ton truck has outputs to rival a Bugatti Veyron, vital stats that give credence to Hennessey’s claim that it has built the world’s most powerful and fastest-accelerating pickup. It’s no secret that Americans love their pickups. Much like in the regular muscle car sector, the major manufacturers are engaged in a goodnatured but deadly serious battle for bragging rights. As its name suggests, Dodge’s bone stock Hemi-powered 702bhp TRX regards Ford’s 450bhp F150 Raptor as something of a Scooby Snack. That might change when the 700bhp Raptor R arrives, but Hennessey appears to have that eventuality more than covered, the Mammoth cutting half a second from the standard TRX’S 0-60mph time, 3.2sec playing 3.7, with the standing quarter mile in 11.4sec at a terminal speed of 120mph. Top speed is limited to 130mph, up from the regular model’s 118.
This test car has the full suite of Hennessey Stage 2 mods. That’s to say the regular Hellcat motor treated to a 2.65-litre high-flow supercharger, plus a new induction system and fuel injectors combined with engine management recalibration. There are also lots of cosmetic changes, most notably 20-inch rims wrapped with humungous offroad tyres, an LED lightbar, custom front and rear bumpers, and an abundance of ‘Mammoth’ badging. It all comes with a two-year, 24,000-mile warranty.
Very little can prepare you for the first time you meet the Mammoth. At 5.81m long, 2.08m wide and 1.97m tall, it’s a gargantuan machine. For a while you simply stand and stare, then walk around it, crouching down to look underneath and shaking your head at the ride height achieved with the TRX’S special remote-reservoir Bilstein dampers and (optional) 37-inch off-road tyres.
For a man of, erm, compact height, even the prospect of getting into the Mammoth is a little intimidating. Fortunately, rather than having to carry a mounting block around with me, the
Mammoth drops its side-steps when unlocked to help you clamber in.
Once up in the driver’s seat, you inhabit a high-rise world. One which places you almost at eye-level with HGV drivers. It’s a hard perspective to get used to because your reference points and view of the road are so far from normal. Fortunately, despite its size, the Mammoth is dead easy to drive. Just drop the eight-speed auto into D, squeeze the throttle and away you go, propelled by a slab of effortless, Ev-style torque and a deep V8 rumble.
The Mammoth’s performance is bewildering. Physics dictates that when you floor the throttle from a standstill it doesn’t exactly yelp off the line. There’s no avoiding the fact that 3 tons takes some shifting, even a full-blooded Launch Mode effecting more of a heave into action than explosive acceleration. A chunk of the initial energy goes into compressing the rear suspension, but once that big, bluff nose has lifted, things begin to happen rather quickly. Usain Bolt was never quick out of the blocks, but once he hit his stride he just seemed to pile on more and more speed. Once it has overcome its own inertia, the Mammoth delivers that same exponential speed gain.
The noise is something else. Eight angry cylinders hollering in competition with a whining supercharger, it’s the perfect soundtrack for the drama you find yourself in the middle of. Once into third gear it just goes and goes and goes, until the sensation of sitting so high up in something so heavy going so quickly sets self-preservation alarms ringing in your head. It’s like riding an avalanche.
Beyond the madness of its full-noise straight-line stonk there’s still a lot to get used to. Weirdly it’s surprisingly easy to place on the road, which is a good thing given how much of the lane it occupies. I’d expected it to be like a super-sized old-generation AMG G-wagen, which has such woolly steering that you aim it like a boat, but despite the lifted suspension and knobbly tyres the Mammoth offers an unexpected degree of connection and decent directional precision.
Braking needs forethought if you’re digging into the straight-line performance. The brakes themselves are impressively powerful with decent progression, but this kind of mass takes some stopping. Better to deploy some Lmp1-style lift-and-coast, both to offer the brakes a bit of respite and to help the Ram find a rhythm with the road. This is not a vehicle that wants – or needs – to be stood on its nose into every corner.
Hmm, corners… On wide, smooth, fast roads the Mammoth manages to make progress with considerable swagger. Sweeping corners don’t ask too much from the front tyres, so it feels grippy and pointy enough that you just peel through gradual curves with barely a roll of the wrists.
Tighter corners are a different matter. With greater speed and more aggressively applied steering input, the Mammoth’s mass, centre-of-gravity and high side-walled tyres suddenly become very apparent. From the outside it might look fun having both inside wheels clear of the tarmac, but from behind the wheel it feels like that moment when you lean back slightly too far on your chair. To the Mammoth’s credit, those fancy Bilstein dampers maintain their cool even when you’re asking something the size of a modest mid-terrace house to tackle a tightening downhill corner at 60mph.
There’s some understeer if you’re overly optimistic with your turn-in speed, but once you learn where the limits of the front tyres are, there’s actually a decent balance to be found. Traction isn’t a problem with four-wheel drive, and if you find the right corner and summon the nerve to nail it you might even feel the Mammoth start working its rear axle a bit harder to neutralise the handling balance. It really shouldn’t work, but it does.
Monstering A- and B-roads is all part of the fun, but what this truck does brilliantly is simply make progress. It’s one of those cars that you feel you could drive all day, in any weather, across any terrain.
‘Once that big, bluff nose has lifted, things begin to happen rather quickly’
Given that Hennessey’s homeland is Texas this is to be expected, but I’m not sure I appreciated quite how good it feels to drive something that feels so utterly indomitable.
It’s functional too, with space to accommodate five adults in icily air-conditioned comfort, plus the muscle to carry a ton of payload in the truck bed and tow almost three and a half tons. If, like many Hennessey customers, you and your buddies have a race car, dune buggy or speedboat to enjoy at weekends, I can’t imagine many machines better able or more enjoyable to haul them with.
It’s all part of a truck culture we don’t really have or appreciate here in the UK. You could argue that this makes the Mammoth rather pointless here, but I would counter that by saying it’s what makes it rather magnificent, wherever you may live. This side of the Atlantic it certainly feels more authentic and likeable than, say, a Lamborghini Urus, or indeed any of the other pumped-up high-performance SUVS, both as a vehicle and as a car enthusiast statement.
There are downsides. Unsurprisingly, this 3-ton,
6.2-litre supercharged beast likes a drink. During our time with the Mammoth it averaged a little under 9mpg. With UK petrol prices hovering around £9 a gallon, even my terrible arithmetic can calculate that’s £1 per mile in fuel alone. With a 27.5-gallon capacity you need to spend a hundred quid just to wet the bottom of the tank. In this regard few cars feel more out of step with the times.
It’s also MASSIVE. Stop anywhere and you need at least two parking spaces. More like four if you’re heading to the supermarket. Country lanes will have you permanently thudding in the gutter and the driver’s side mirror thwacking the undergrowth. You also need to be prepared for other people’s reactions. Some love it so much they almost crash into you while trying to wave or take photos. Others positively loathe it. I guess that’s inevitable, and not so dissimilar to driving any other extreme car, be it a hypercar or hypertruck.
Hennessey has already sold somewhere in the region of 300 Mammoths. Tick every box on the upgrade and options lists and – in the US – it roughly doubles the showroom price of a regular Ram 1500 TRX from circa $80,000 to more like $150,000. If you wanted to bring one into the UK (as some already have) we reckon it would be in the region of £125,000 plus import duties and VAT. Ironically that’s somewhere close to the list price of the aforementioned Lamborghini Urus.
The Mammoth is a ludicrous machine in every respect, yet it’s also an outrageously enjoyable antidote to the UK and Europe’s somewhat uptight fast car scene. The Thrill of Driving comes no bigger than this.
Engine V8, 6166cc, supercharged
Power 1012bhp @ 6500rpm Torque 969lb ft @ 4200rpm Weight 3114kg (330bhp/ton) 0-60mph 3.2sec Top speed 130mph Basic price c$150,000 (US)
+ The thrill of driving, Texas-style
- £1-per-mile fuel costs evo rating ★★★★ ☆
THERE ISN’T MUCH THAT THE HEALEY BY Caton and the Ferrari SF90 Spider over the page have in common. They both have four wheels, seating for two and burn the highest octane fuel available (although the Italian has a sizeable battery to help with propulsion, too). They also share a similar price. Although it may surprise you to learn that the Ferrari is the cheaper of the two…
Okay, so while the prospect of a restomod Healey that’s based on the 90bhp 100/4BN1 built between 1953 and ’55 and costing more than a near-1000bhp Ferrari hypercar sinks in, here’s what the best part of half a million quid gets you. It allows you to hand over a Healey 100/4BN1 to a company called Caton, which is part of the Envisage Group, which you are unlikely to have heard of unless you follow the work of concept car builders closely. Caton takes your Healey, strips it to the bare bones and rebuilds it again with all the learnings it and Healey specialist JME, whose day job is building the most competitive Healey competition cars available, have garnered over the decades; this isn’t Caton’s first foray into the sector, having been responsible for a number of continuation car projects, most noticeably with Jaguar Classic.
The 2.6-litre four-cylinder engine is dispatched to JME for a capacity increase during a sump-to-cylinderhead rebuild, returning with 3 litres, 185bhp and 195lb ft, which is dispatched to the rear axle via a new
five-speed Tremac gearbox that replaces the original three-plus-overdrive unit. In a car weighing 920kg and no bigger than an MX-5 it’s impossible not to grin like an idiot as you approach the iconic shape.
Healey aficionados will spot some changes, such as the de-seemed body, the lack of bumpers and the LED projector headlamps. The front grille is made from beautifully machined pieces of aluminium and the aeroscreen design mimics the Healey badge.
Changes to the cockpit mean that while there’s no room for a hood or a spare wheel there’s more leg room, although you’ll need to sit close to the fixed steering wheel in order to reach the new pedal box. This is no bad thing as it turns out, because the Healey needs a bit of arm movement when you get flowing.
Hold the starter button, listen for the fuel pumps, and with your foot on the brake press the starter again to fire the meaty motor into life with an unapologetic rasp as it clears its throat. It settles to an idle with a few lumps in it as the exhaust, exiting in line with your shoulder on this left-hand-drive prototype, amplifies the straight-four’s tune. There’s been no attempt to smooth things out nor quieten them down when it comes to the ‘big four’, which is just how it should be.
In fact none of the experience has been watered down. There’s weight to the clutch that anyone brought up on modern machinery will find alien, and it needs measured movement and a deft left foot. The shift feels solid and instinctive through the gate, the throttle a little tight at first and requiring more pressure to pick the revs up and get you on your way. When you do, the magic of a small, light responsive car washes over you, the experience all-encompassing.
Above 1500rpm the 3-litre starts really filling its lungs, the exhaust note hardening as the induction roar increases and speed begins to climb and climb and climb. It’s not as responsive as a Caterham off the line, building speed in a more linear motion, but a 986 Porsche Boxster driver would need to be on their game to keep you at bay.
Although the Healey driver will be far busier. The engine will run to its 5000rpm peak but you find yourself changing up over 500rpm earlier to keep the four on the boil, optimising the gear ratios rather than hanging on to every last drop of power. On a warm day you’re working up a sweat, feet jumping across pedals to perfect heel and toe downshifts, right arm commanding the shifts when both hands aren’t required on the busy steering wheel.
And it can get rather busy because there’s not much reaction to your initial inputs; that old-school looseness of classic cars around the centre remains. It’s constantly busy as you position the Caton on the road to take advantage of its size and carve the neatest line through any curve. It wants to be hustled, with late turn-ins and as much throttle as you can manage, feeling the Michelin radials moving around beneath you and the leather-trimmed seat filling in the blanks left by the less than chatty steering. You’re instantly immersed in its charms and character.
The brakes never feel overstretched, but while the body is nicely controlled, the suspension can run out of support pretty early if the surface gets choppy. But it’s nothing you can’t work with and nothing you wouldn’t expect from a car with leaf springs.
Justifying nearly half a million pounds for any car is nigh on impossible, harder still when you consider you could restore the roughest example of the donor car to original spec for a fraction of the cost. But to mangle that famous phrase: the experience will remain long after the price is forgotten.
‘NONE OF THE EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN WATERED DOWN’
Engine In-line 4-cyl, 2954cc Power 185bhp @ 5000rpm Torque 195lb ft Weight 920kg (204bhp/ton) 0-60mph 8.0sec Top speed 120mph (est) Price £475,000 (plus donor car)
+ Bags of character and charm; exquisitely executed
- Half a million quid and leaf springs evo rating