The new 702-horsepower 2021 Ram 1500 TRX is the supertruck du jour, designed to handle all kinds of rough-and-tumble off-road fun. However, Mike from YouTube's Street Speed 717 channel found the limits of that beefiness when he chucked his highly-optioned $93,000 Launch Edition TRX off of a huge jump with poorly secured wheels in the bed. Good news for everyone still waiting for their TRX: Street Speed 717's walk-around of the post-jump damage really doesn't sound that bad.
Mike estimates that he did about 60 mph off of a dirt ramp that launched the roughly 6,400-lb truck about 20 feet in the air. He reckons that it landed about 40 feet or so off the ramp—hard on its nose. The truck bucked back upon landing and sent the wheels in the bed flying into the rear window, at which point they completely smashed out the entire length of said window. He says he wasn't hurt at all in the jump, but also tells viewers not to try this at home.
The video thumbnail for this post-mortem report says it was worse than the YouTuber thought, but frankly, this truck fared way better than most of us at The Drive expected it to. Maybe we all have low expectations, or that time I landed a Subaru its oil pan is still too fresh in my brain. (RIP, Rallycross Space Shuttle. You are missed.) This TRX still runs and drives and did so at 85 mph all the way home, per its owner. The beloved Hellcat engine under its hood didn't seem to mind all the extra jostling around.
The alignment, however, skews a little bit to the left, and that's far from the only issue here.
I have my doubts as to whether the frame is actually straight, but that's something that would probably have to be measured by a body shop. This thing came down so hard on one corner that it reminded me of one of those "Dukes of Hazzard" jumps where they edited out the landing and cut to a completely different car. Even the owner admits that "there might be some issues that you can't see with the naked eye, but it actually does go very straight and nice down the road."
The body panels don't line up all that well, with panel gaps that are visibly wider on one side of the TRX than they are on the other. There's a big dent in the front driver's side of the bed that's probably from the wheels that were put back there to put more weight on the rear of the truck to make the jump. The bed itself fits closer to the cab on the driver's side than it does on the passenger side. You can see where the bed actually hit the back of the cab on the driver's side as well, leaving a dent and chipping off some paint.
The hood also wiggles a bit more than it should. The front bumper, passenger-side fog lamp and the massive skid plate underneath it are completely smashed in, with most of the damage being on that passenger side. The passenger-side inner fender liner is naturally toast, but you didn't really send it hard enough if all of those survive.
Even thought it's pretty thick, the skid plate got smashed so badly that it broke the clips for the remote shock reservoirs underneath it. Fortunately, the front skid plate held the reservoirs off the ground for the drive home.
The rear bumper is also bent. The driver's side bed step that folds down from the corner is completely unusable and the exhaust pipe no longer lines up neatly into its notch in the rear bumper. The tailgate is ripped apart at the top, with a big crack at the driver's side edge, but it does still open and close just fine.
Under the hood, the Hellcat engine still runs like nothing happened, as far as we can tell. The truck just now hit 1,000 miles, after all. The biggest problem was its battery mount, which completely snapped and left the battery hanging loose in the engine bay.
After all this, Mike took a hammer to the TRX's fender and started smashing away. Some people just want to watch the world burn and/or fit larger tires. ¿Por qué no los dos?
While the merits of giving this particular brofluencer the attention he craves will be hotly debated until the end of time, this jump damage did attract the interest of Bilstein, who made the TRX's shocks. Bilstein actually reached out to Street Speed 717 for more details on what happened. Like it or not, this incredible send is a valid stress test for both Ram and the makers of the components that went onto the truck who should be curious as to what failed, how it failed and how they might be able to improve their products in the future.
Mike doesn't see this list of busted parts as much of a setback, but rather, an excuse to modify the truck into something even more capable and fun.
"I feel like it would take too long to get the parts [to return it back to stock]," explains the YouTuber. "I don't really care. I'm having fun with the truck. I still love the truck. So, let's keep going. Let's make it a fun off-roader."
An off-road toy doesn't need to be perfectly straight or cosmetically pretty anyway. This TRX has character now—and a hammer dug into the fender. That, too. Bless his heart.
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