I was curious if a tracked vehicle could ever be fast enough to compete in an extreme off road rally like the Dakar, so I googled “fastest tracked vehicle” and came up with the Ripsaw vehicle created by Howe & Howe productions.

Ripsaw

At 80mph it beats the M1, but is probably still to slow to win a rally. Still very impressive creation with 450hp blown 427 and 14 in of suspension travel. Autoblog has a nice description and video, and the makers have a less useful site with some pictures and broken video link.

Read [via Autoblog}

Update: New post here

Howe and Howe have developed this concept vehicle into the Ripsaw MS1, an unmanned fighting vehicle for the US military, and are developing several other special purpose tracked vehicles.