90 Chevy 454 SS vs ’94 Ford Lightning F150 MuscleTrux Wars

These days, as performance enthusiasts, we are fortunate to have some pretty cool offerings in the world of pickup trucks. Vehicles like the SVT Raptor and Ram TRX really bring our senses to life, giving adrenaline junkies something special straight from the factory that not only allows drivers to go off of the beaten path but also do so with an insane amount of available horsepower on tap.

While these pickup offerings might seem like a brand-new concept to some younger performance lovers, the older generation realizes that there was an era of muscle trucks that seemed to inspire the machines that we see today.

In the early 1990s, the concept was relatively new and raw. In fact, the fresh and exciting idea was one that some might’ve even seen as being a little bit ahead of its time. The idea of taking a pickup truck which was previously seen as nothing more than a workhorse and making it something sporty and cool certainly stood out among the landscape of performance at the time. Doing this well would be a challenge and was not only thought outside of the box but was something that had a lot of potentials to succeed with some more time at the drawing board, even though that time wouldn’t really come for decades.

This time, we ride along with an episode of MuscleTrux Wars that digs into the beginning days of the muscle truck to tap into the excitement of the Chevrolet 454 SS and the original Ford Lightning. After digging into the background that tells exactly where the trucks came from, the idea for this series is to then build them up and do something special. Before the builds get going, though, we get the opportunity to see how the big block Chevrolet stands up against the small block Ford in dyno testing along with a bit of a review following a fun street session.