Talking Trucks Tuesday: Will Sports Trucks Return?

With recent updates to the and Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro, along with the return of the , the off-road pickup truck market is doing quite well. You can read all about full-size factory-built off-road pickups in our upcoming 2017 Monster Factory Off-Road Challenge.

But with all the hype on the dirty end of the spectrum, we're wondering what happened to the street sports truck market. Even during the horsepower-strangled 1970s, manufacturers attempted to build sporty pickups. Perhaps best known was the Dodge Lil' Red Express, which basically amounted to a modified 360 police car engine with exhaust stacks. In 1978 Car and Driver named it the fastest American-made vehicle in the zero-to-100-mph category — and that was of all vehicles.

By the 1990s the amusement factor grew: First came the 454 SS Chevy Silverado 1500 with 385 pounds-feet of torque and 3.73:1 gears. GMC answered with the turbocharged all-wheel-drive Syclone that famously beat a Ferrari in a magazine-sponsored drag race — and then outbraked it from 70 mph.

Ford lowered an F-150, dropped in its stoutest 240-hp, 5.8-liter V-8 and heavy-duty automatic transmission and called it the SVT Lightning. Ford then supercharged it to 360-plus horsepower six years later.

Dodge Ram's Viper-powered SRT-10 did 60 mph in less than 5 seconds and 154 mph despite weighing 2.5 tons and exhibiting the aerodynamics of a brick. Toyota's supercharged Tundra TRD, with more horsepower than the SRT-10, accelerated better while testing traction control at every instance.

These days a Ram 1500 Sport — Hemi engine, 3.92:1 ring-and-pinion gears and 22-inch forged-aluminum rims — is as close as one gets to those regular-cab, short-bed hot rods. But wouldn't a turbocharged 3.5-liter V-6 (regular or high output), lowered, two-wheel-drive F-150 regular cab be fun too? Or a 6.2-liter V-8-powered Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Midnight Edition in the same configuration? Nothing extraneous, just power, decent shocks, a limited-slip differential and sticky tires.

Do you want sports trucks back, and if you do, how would you set yours up? Let us know in the comments section below.

Cars.com graphic by Paul Dolan; manufacturer image