As I've previously ranted on not too long ago, American cars bewilder the ever loving freedom out of me, but much, MUCH more befuddling to me than the muscle car is the utterly baffling obsession Americans have with their dangerously—and wastefully—large pickup trucks, two of which we're featuring this week on Car of the Week.
Hoo boy.
You see, where I'm from (Singapore), we use light lorries and vans—such as the Toyota Dyna and Nissan NV350—to carry goods for small and medium companies and to make deliveries. Despite their much smaller silhouettes and mass to your typical modern day American monstrosities, these lorries and trucks seem to me to be no less practical in terms of cargo space. In fact, because a lorry has its bed so low, one could put and retrieve smaller items from the bed without even setting down the tail or side gates, and forklifts could load and unload them from either side or the rear. A van on the other hand, doesn't have to worry about its payload when it starts to rain. None of these advantages apply to a pickup truck as far as I can tell, which by comparison, makes those big pickup trucks look like silly caricatures at best, and the one video I watched that constitutes my entire research into the history of pickup trucks make them sound way, WAY worse than a bad joke.
Even worse than the lighting and composition of this photo.
Of course, these industrial vehicles are hardly built for luxury or fun, and can be properly terrifying to drive even at sensible speeds, especially in the wet. And maybe that's where pickup trucks come in to fill in that large void—or at least, the two atheletic examples of pickups we get in this game seem built with the specific aim of driving just like a normal car. Both the Ford F-150 SVT Raptor '11 and the Toyota Tundra TRD Pro '19 have weight distributions closely aligned with a sensible sedan, at 57:43 and 56:44 respectively, and both have specialised, competition springs just to drive that point home. Both have big, F–off naturally aspirated V8s that's been taken from more sensible cars and hooked to lightning quick 6–speed automatic gearboxes, driving thick, chonky tyres designed to handle multiple terrains/seasons, both Comfort Mediums by default in GT7. And, you know, they have ABS. I like that. I like that a lot. Don't ask.
On a closed racetrack, I'm tempted to say that both these trucks achieve that goal of driving just like a sedan, but that would be slightly disingenuous because in practice, they flat out drive better than some "sensible" cars of I've sampled in this game, like a GC Impreza! In fact, these trucks drive so well initially that, if it weren't for the ridiculously tall seating/camera placement and unintuitively wide bodies, it'd take me a while to figure out that I'm in something that's way too big and heavy to even have any right to fantasise about doing the speeds I'm doing, both in the straights and corners. In terms of sheer pace, they will both decimate any sensible family transport without a Tesla badge on them (if Teslas make sense to you, that is). It's truly mind–boggling what the engineers of both these trucks have managed to achieve with their respective trucks.
But that's all the praise I can give them: they drive like normal cars. There's nothing remotely sporty, exciting, or attractive about them, and to prove that, I brought a gun to a knife fight. A water pistol of a sports car to a chainsaw deathmatch involving the trucks, but a gun nonetheless.
This here is a base model 2015 Toyota 86. It's got a pansy naturally aspirated 2L 4 cylinder engine incapable of even 200HP, and it's equipped with a millennial anti–theft device known as a 6–speed manual gearbox that makes it a little slow and awkward to drive fast, even when not being stolen. Aside from a JDM spec Mazda Roadster, this is the slowest sports car money can buy brand new in the last ten years, and it has so little presence that most English speaking folk don't even say its name right! (It's read as "eight–six", by the way.) And yet, this unassuming 86 absolutely devoured both trucks alive and spit their fat–clogged hearts out on any stretch of road that has curvature any sharper than that of the earth's surface, and just in case you're thinking that I ran these three vehicles on a winding mountain pass to favour the 86, na–uh. I ran them on Watkin's Glen Short Course, which has 2 long, flat out sections not including the home straight, and it's there where I found out that, somewhere around 160km/h (99mph), the trucks get strangled so badly by atmospheric air that the 86 reels them in like dead fish in the desert, earning overzealous truck drivers an excruciatingly rare distinction almost unheard of in the car industry: Being utterly DESTROYED by an 86 in the straights!
And wait till you get to a corner with these trucks!
While both trucks drive incredibly neutral and much like a sensible car, that illusion crumples away completely when I ask either of them for their front tyres to do their most under trail braking for a corner. Turning these trucks hard with more than a third of the brake pedal applied—or simply turning the steering wheel too quickly for that matter—will just cause the sidewall of these ultra high profile tyres to flex, surrendering almost all grip instantly and resulting in the trucks suddenly going limp and becoming completely vague, liable to send the trucks into a complete spin in extreme cases. Before you ask—the trucks barely have enough torque to hold a slide on loose surfaces like dirt and snow, but both their gearing are way too widespread to make sliding viable even when grip is at a premium, much less on paved roads.
This tyre flexing issue and easily losing grip not only forces me to keep braking and turning almost entirely separate, but I also actively drive these trucks up to about nine tenths their grip limits at most, simply because anything more is a crapshoot at best and asking for trouble at worst. This problem can be remedied somewhat by simply fitting the largest diameter wheels you can find in GT Auto to minimise tyre sidewall and flex—I've seen up to 24–inch hula hoops on offer for these things, which succeeds not only in largely fixing the tyre flex problem, but also in somehow managing to make these trucks look even more stupid. Imagine making a truck completely useless for anything a truck might actually be used for, all just to still get spanked silly by an 86 around any given track in the game.
If you absolutely, positively MUST drive a truck in the game, either for morbid curiosity or simply to check off the truck events in the campaign, just go with the Ford F-150; it's better in every aspect compared to the Toyota Tundra when both are bone stock. It accelerates much better in a straight line with more power and a very even torque curve, and despite the F-150 being heavier and less balanced in comparison to the Tundra, none of it shows in the corners at all. The Ford is cheaper, too! The Tundra, despite being the newer truck, is a bloody disaster to drive, having a uselessly peaky engine that's extremely picky with revs. Worse still, it comes with a wide open diff that makes it freak the hell out if even half a wheel is dipped past paved tarmac, while making it an unwieldy and moody mess that is nigh uncontrollable in torrential downpour and loose surfaces. I don't know what Toyota were going for when they set up the TRD Pro, but to be outclassed in every on–track measure by a Raptor much older than it is frankly a hell of an embarrassing look.
In terms of aftermarket options, the Tundra might have a sliver of a chance at outshining the F-150, thanks to the engine swap options both these cars get. The F-150 gets the utterly bonkers 7L twin–turbocharged V8 Windsor 351 engine from the hot rod Maverick, capable of a stupefying 1,199HP (894kW) even before aftermarket parts bring that further up. While the 516HP (385kW) of the naturally aspirated V8 available to swap into the Tundra sounds pitiful in comparison, the donor of that engine is the Lexus PETRONAS TOM'S SC430 GT500 machine—a racecar. That means racecar fuel efficiency in a game that gives racecars unreal mileage out of these fire breathing competition engines, allowing a maxed out, stripped out 838HP Tundra to drive from lights to flag non–stop with minimal fuel saving in the notorious Tokyo grind race! Imagine that, in a truck with the aerodynamic properties of a house wrapped in sandpaper!
Still, neither truck is particularly fun to drive. Riding high on a truck is sort of like riding on a Ferris Wheel; it's fun and novel the first or maybe even second time, but after that, it just becomes boring after the novelty wears off. I would legitimately prefer a Daihatsu Midget over any of these things, and the only use I might see for these pickup trucks is to ferry a Midget back home on Bring A Trailer. I've heard that the trick is to befriend someone who owns a pickup rather than having one yourself.
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