Watch a Lifted Ford Crown Victoria LTD on 30-Inch Rims Hit the Drag Strip
How to fight inertia, gravity, and sensible design all at once.
Hi-risers have always been one of the more maligned automotive subcultures. Chalk it up to either geographical limitations or artistic differences, but you can't throw a 30-inch rim without hitting someone who has a strong opinion about their value. Doesn't jacking up an old American boat and stuffing massive spinners and low-profile rubber bands underneath ruin the car completely? In some ways, yes. In other ways, like drag racing, it turns out the answer is no, not really.
It's not every day you see a late-1980s Ford Crown Victoria LTD roll up to the line on 30-inch chrome rims rocking a flamboyant Family Guy-themed paint job. And lest you think it's all for show, the owner immediately lays down a tasty pre-run burnout as if to say "yes, we are doing this." By the sounds of it, the standard anemic 4.9L V8 has either been scrapped for something entirely more sinister—not to mention the addition of nitrous.
And while the modified suspension and thin tires could make this tank a handful in the quarter-mile, the first run at 0:50 puts that notion to bed. It's definitely not what we would call quick off the line, but momentum is a powerful force, it tracks straight, and the nitrous appears to give it some serious legs in third gear. Unfortunately the finish line is out of sight, so there's no way to pin down an exact time. An extremely unscientific examination of the final run yields something in the range of 10-15 seconds.
Not bad at all for something that's about as far from a drag-built car as you can get. The only thing missing from the video is someone in the opposite lane—but then again, the field of qualifying hi-rise competitors is probably pretty damn small.