1,000 HP CTS-V vs. Twin-Turbo Pickup

A parking-lot drag race to end all parking-lot drag races.

This Hoonigan video pits two LS-powered monsters against each other: a twin-turbo pickup and a Cadillac CTS-V with 1,000 horsepower. Let’s look at these two high-horsepower machines in greater detail.

The pickup, a late ’80s/early ’90s Mazda B-series pickup is very stealthy, with beat-up paint and a lawnmower and a weedwhacker bolted to the pickup bed. It’s an intense commitment to the sleeper aesthetic. Sharing space with the lawnmower and weedwhacker in the bed are a racing fuel cell and the battery. This frees up plenty of space under the hood for the big V-8 and the plumbing required for a pair of turbochargers.

The headlights are replaced by small projectors hidden in the bumper, while the original headlight openings are now used to feed copious amounts of air to the twin Turbonetics turbochargers. Surprisingly, the trans is a T-56 – we can’t imagine anything more fun than rowing our own gears in a twin turbo LS-powered pickup that weighs next to nothing. That’s especially true with a claimed 700 horsepower under that unassuming-looking hood.

It’s a pretty impressive-looking setup, with tons of attention to detail underneath the mismatched exterior. The builder designed the truck for ease of maintenance, using artfully bent hard lines for plumbing throughout in lieu of rubber or silicone. There’s no space for a core support, but the radiator, fan, and intercooler are set up to be removed as one sub-assembly for service. Clever.

After all of that, there’s not much to say about the CTS-V. It’s pretty, more or less stock-appearing, and apparently puts down an honest-to-goodness 1,000 horsepower to the wheels.

The next step is a very, very short parking lot drag race – about sixty feet, actually. There’s not much room to play at the Hoonigan offices. It’s as much down to reaction time and driver skill as it is outright power.

So who wins? We do! both are LS-powered, after all. It’s a photo finish that’s definitely worth sticking around for.

Cam Vanderhorst

Cam VanDerHorst has been a contributor to Internet Brands' Auto Group sites for over three years, with his byline appearing on Ford Truck Enthusiasts, Corvette Forum, JK Forum, and Harley-Davidson Forums, among others. In that time, he's also contributed to Autoweek, The Drive, and Scale Auto Magazine.
He bought his first car at age 14 -- a 1978 Ford Mustang II -- and since then he’s amassed an impressive and diverse collection of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, including a 1996 Ford Mustang SVT Mystic Cobra (#683) and a classic air-cooled Porsche 911.
In addition to writing about cars and wrenching on them in his spare time, he enjoys playing music (drums and ukulele), building model cars, and tending to his chickens.
You can follow Cam, his cars, his bikes, and his chickens at @camvanderhorst on Instagram.

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