What happens when you cross a 700hp Hellcat engine with a 1989 Jeep Grand Wagoneer? Awesome happens, that’s what!
In this week’s edition of Hot or Not? we bring you a rather mental 700hp Jeep Grand Wagoneer, in all its wood-panel awesomeness! We first saw this fairly silly build over on US site Motortrend and thought it only right to show the masses.
So as you may have guessed, the donk has come from the Dodge HellCat; a 700hp 6.2-litre Hemi V8 with a monstrous blower sitting on the top of it. The vehicle is the much-loved Jeep Grand Wagoneer, including the 80s retro wood-panel sides and over-square inverted slant front. As was all the rage back then (hell, who are we kidding, even now!), big American four-wheel drives had big American engine bays for, well, big American engines! With this in mind, slotting the 700hp Hemi in the Wagoneer wasn’t so much shoehorning as it was throwing it at the hole and lining things up.
Lobbing the engine into the engine bay wasn’t the biggest issue, funnily enough, with the team at Collins Bros. Jeep in Wylie, Texas spending a little over 460 man-hours to get the conversion to work. It was the everything else that took the lion’s share of time. That included essentially a ground-up restoration of the Jeep Wagoneer, which the folks at Collins Bros. do full time. The workshop builds around 24 restored or custom Grand Wagoneers every year, with most being commissioned and the owner being involved from the get-go. This was something a little different, being more of a pet-project for the entire team.
Should you be in the market for a 700hp Hellcat powered Jeep Wagoneer, you can have a look at the for sale ad that Collins has up… though we don’t like your chances of getting it complied once you get it Down Under…
