A slammed, sparkly pink Japanese pickup truck from the 1990s is the last thing I’d ever thought I’d see from Rutledge Wood. Yet that’s exactly what the former “Top Gear” host brought to Toyota’s SEMA booth.
Wood says the truck was a labor of love that took over five years to build with the help of his friends (one of whom he mentions sadly passed away from cancer a little over a year ago.) The first thing you’ll probably notice about the truck is its paint job.
Being a dad of three daughters, Wood thought it would be cool to have his girls give a bit of input on the color. Well, a lot of input. The exterior of the truck is covered in a shade of sparkly pink paint that looks great. There’s other great details, like a purple roll bar, white tinted head and tail lights and chrome bumper and wheels. Wood says the whole paint and exterior design of the truck was inspired by the JDM tuner scene, lowriders and Japan’s underground drift scene.
That drift inspiration extends to the goodies under the hood. Woods fit a 2JZ twin-turbo I6 under the hood of the pickup. Given how small the truck is, the engine was a tight fit and jamming it in took some creative thinking on the part of Wood and friends. Take the truck’s intercooler for instance; with Rutledge’s southern heritage, he needed to make sure that the pickup has a working air conditioning but because of how tight a fit the engine was and the intercooler taking up a lot of the engine bay, certain components like the a/c had to be relocated into the bed.
Its existence is a beautiful thing. It shows that there are people out there thinking about the fringe of the automotive world. And given that this was a collab between friends and his daughters, it’s definitely something that should stay with Wood and his family for a long time.
