If you told someone that you had just bought a blue 1996 Dodge with white racing stripes, most would assume that you had just forked out for a second-generation Viper.
Little-known to them, you had actually just bought an extremely limited Ram pace truck for a fraction of the price, and thanks to its rich American motorsport heritage, it's basically as cool. And there's one for sale in NZ.
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When the Viper got the nod to pace the Indy 500 in '96, Ram pickups would be the official vehicle of the week. Grabbing onto the red hot sport truck movement, they created just over 2, 800 like the 1996 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup you see here.
Under the hood is the original fuel-injected 5.9-liter Magnum V8. This special edition package raised the horsepower for a total of 245hp, part of it was thanks to the sport exhaust which sounds just raw and muscle-car-style when you fire up the engine.
Back in its day, this Magnum V8 was the most powerful engine of its kind to be fitted to a pickup truck, making this an extremely sought after piece of American muscle.
While this particular example never actually saw a race track, the seller states that it was owned by a Chrysler engineer who kept it in a climate-controlled garage for most of its life.
And with a touch over 100,000km on the clock, this could well be the best-kept example in the world.