You may think this UPS truck was removed from Iron Horse Auction because it’s a four-ton, 850 horsepower beast designed for NASCAR and thus isn’t meant for the streets trodden by the common man, but you’d be wrong. They weren’t trying to save pedestrians or the pinks slips of all the FedEx and Amazon drivers you’d challenge. The only reason you can’t purchase this beast is that the “owner” has no paperwork on it.
Usually, UPS is pretty on top of keeping its package cars out of the grubby mitts of the public. UPS trucks are built just for UPS, and when they outlive their usefulness as a delivery truck they’re either converted to distribution center runabouts or immediately crushed. This truck seems to have escaped that treatment by being part of an ad campaign 13 years ago, according to Car and Driver, which UPS called “Race The Truck.”
Back then UPS claimed NASCAR fans were begging the company to allow driver Dale Jarrett to race one of their Package Cars for years, and even centered an advertising campaign around the nonexistent groundswell of support. In the mid-2000s, UPS delivered on this “demand” with a publicity stunt that included a few funny commercials, like this one (the title says 2001, but rest assured this video is from a few years later):
Stunt driver and automotive fabricator Mike Ryan put his team to work making the big brown truck a viable racer. From Car and Driver:
The Dale Jarrett UPS truck was built in 2006 by Mike Ryan, a stunt-vehicle builder, in less than three weeks. His team took a 23-foot-long 1990 UPS P-800 Package Car with more than 300,000 miles on the odometer, stripped it down completely, and transformed it with a fabricated roll cage, a TRD race engine, a custom transmission, racing suspension and shocks, a roll cage and racing gauges, and a racing harness, among other features that have no place in a big brown truck.
The truck was supposed to go up for auction yesterday, but it seems things have hit a bit of a snag as the seller lacked a title. You don’t need to be a car buying-expert to know that’s a problem when it comes to selling a vehicle. In fact, Iron Horse Auction isn’t entirely sure how this person got their hands on this strange truck in the first place.
This may have been your one chance to drive one. Not just drive one, but properly hoon it. And it was ruined by paperwork. Typical.