LS-Swapped Toyota Tacoma Runs 9s on a Tight Budget: Track Time Tuesday Presented by the All-New Nitto Recon Grappler™ A/T
A mostly stock motor with a turbo is all this LS-swapped Toyota Tacoma needs to go fast at the drag strip.
It’s hard to believe there was a time, not too long ago, when fast trucks weren’t really a thing. Few even bothered to try and make their trucks quick at the drag strip, mainly because they weren’t interested in trying to overcome the laws of physics. That certainly isn’t the case today, of course, when pickups like this LS-swapped Toyota Tacoma are a regular sight at the local drags.
The subject of this week’s Track Time Tuesday presented by Nitto, this LS-swapped Toyota Tacoma – owned by Scott Weaver II – was also built on a budget, which makes it even cooler in our book. It follows the typical formula in that sense, with a mostly stock 5.3-liter LS V8 strapped with a large turbo, in this case, a Borg Warner s475 that helps it produce enough juice to run a best time of 9.98 seconds at 133.78 mph.
That’s quite a departure from the typical stock 1996 Tacoma, which came equipped with either an inline-four-cylinder or V6 with around 190 horsepower at most. But this particular pickup now has a stock bottom-end LS being fed 10 pounds of boost, which is enough to get it down the quarter-mile pretty quickly. It’s supported by an 8.8-inch rear end from a Ford Explorer, which is stuffed with 3.27 gears and wears some Mickey Thompson rubber in the rear to help it hook.
The LS is backed up by GM’s tried-and-true TH400 transmission, and the rest is basically just a rusty old regular cab pickup. We can see the fuel cell filler cap peeking out from a hole in the bed, and the truck has a bed-mounted fan and a roll cage as well. Heck, the rear wheels even came from the Explorer that donated the rear end. It’s a true home-built budget rocketship, but it all holds up rather well when the light turns green, as we can see in this video from Race Your Ride.
The old Taco is quick enough to take down some pretty pricey modern muscle cars, and for that, we’d call it a success. But it’s also reportedly a work in progress, and there’s plenty of room to grow here, as well as time to shave off that already impressive E.T.
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