Sport Truck
Normally, you’d expect a bigwig from one of America’s largest and most successful corporations to ride around in a chauffeur-driven limo or possibly drive a highroller car such as a Mercedes-Benz, a BMW or even a Cadillac. Not if that executive is a down-home country boy turned VP, whose love for cars and trucks has been credited with the successful about-face in the marketing of one of American’s most famous brands of vehicles-Chevrolet. Jim Perkins, Vice President of General Motors and Chevrolet’s General Manager, is a regular guy from Texas who just happens to like performance cars and trucks. His latest “ride” is an all-wheel-drive 300hp S-10 pickup, aptly nicknamed Baby Thunder by Mark McPhail of the Chevy Race Shop. Built with off-the-shelf GM parts by the Chevy Race Shop and John Moss’ skunkworks operation at GM’s Arizona Proving Grounds near Phoenix, Baby Thunder is packed with a Corvette LT1 V8 that’s mated to a modified 4L60-E automatic and Astro van all-wheel-drive viscous transfer case that splits power to an S-10 4×4 axle up front and standard 3.42:1 rearend out back. The rear suspension was lowered slightly and the truck was fitted with ’93 Corvette wheels shod with huge Goodyear GSC tires. On the inside is a floor-mounted Corvette shifter, bucket seats and full instrumentation lifted from a GMC Syclone. Last year at our Sport Truck shootout (“Tripping the Lights Fantastic,” August ’94), the truck ran the quarter in 13.90 seconds at 97.71 mph. So how do we know Perkins actually drives the thing? He made a surprise appearance in Baby Thunder at a recent truck show in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we took these pictures.
