This is especially true if there’s a lot of snow…
Years and years ago I can remember the first time I saw a car with tracks instead of wheels. It was at a gas station in Utah near the mouth of a canyon in the dead of winter. A guy pulled up to one of the pumps in a lifted Jeep XJ and I did a double take upon realizing it wasn’t riding on massive tires. It was obvious the plan was to head into the backcountry for some playtime, going where normally only snowmobiles could make it in the winter.
Since then I’ve seen quite a few other vehicles with these attachable treads, ranging from Subarus to Ford Expeditions. However, I’ve never seen anything nearly as powerful as a Raptor running this kind of setup, apart from Ken Block’s crazy builds. That guy has a lot of resources the rest of us don’t, so it’s intriguing to see a YouTuber who’s more like an average Joe run treads on his high-powered truck.
We covered Westen Champlin before when the guy finally got his Cummins-powered Mustang running. You can draw two conclusions from these projects. One, the guy is pretty crazy. Two, he’s a big Ford fan. It’s just to be expected that he does some crazy thing with his cars and posts videos about it on YouTube, and we certainly aren’t disappointed by the results.
The first video chronicles Champlin installing the treads on his Ford Raptor and initially testing them out. Since he’s in Kansas and far away from mountains as well as deep snow, he wants to transport the truck to Colorado for a solid test.
That takes us to the next video where Champlin is playing in the snow, only he’s still in Kansas and it’s just a light blanketing of the white stuff. We really want to see this thing playing hard in the Rockies with snow up to the doors. Anyway, he breaks one of the treads while speeding through a snowy field. We’re not entirely sure if this is the result of the truck being too powerful, Champlin buying cheap treads, or something else. Check it out and draw your own conclusions.
