Each year the NHRA’s Four-Wide Nationals, held at the zMax Dragway in North Carolina and featuring 10,000 horsepower, nitro-burning Top Fuel Dragsters and Funny Cars lined up four abreast, is touted as the most powerful motor racing event in the world. In terms of wheel-driven vehicles with actual internal combustion engines, that would be fairly accurate statement, but it’s not the single most powerful side-by-side matchup you can find in drag racing.

In fact, it’s not even close.

Internationally famous jet racer Les Shockley was the original created of the two “Shockwave” multi-jet engine trucks you see lined up here, the first of which is now owned and campaigned at exhibition events with a fresh new look by Neal and Chris Darnell. Producing the equivalent of 36,000 horsepower, the Darnells’ truck is a whole lot of power in one massive package, and when it lined up alongside Shockley’s custom 1957 Chevrolet truck, featuring a pair of Pratty & Whitney J 34-38 engines, at the U.S. 131 Motorsports Park last summer, there was enough collective horsepower on the starting line to make the earth switch its poles. 

How about an estimated 60,000 horsepower? At 700 horsepower apiece, it would take 85 NASCAR Sprint Cup stock cars — two whole fields of cars — to equal that amount of power.

Considering their sheer mass, neither truck is particularly quick from a standing start, thus effecting the final elapsed time, but once you get these trucks rolling, there’s not much that can stop them. The numbers on the scoreboard aside, the afterburner pops and the smoke show from these two trucks and their five combined jet engines is worth the price of admission. And even if you’ve seen your fair share of jet cars and find yourself unimpressed, it would be hard to walk away from this epic show between the two Shockwave trucks.