Imagine rolling up to your high school reunion on a golden throne carried by your servants, like some pharaoh who thinks he’s a living god. That was the glorious awkwardness parking the at a Denny’s. That was only the beginning of a surreal weekend at the infamous Mint 400 off-road race with this preposterous truck.

(: Vehicle loaned to us by Mercedes-Benz. Hotel paid for by the Mint 400 race organizers. Sixty-something gallons of high octane gasoline purchased by Jalopnik. That was not a fun expense report to file.)

The dateline is Primm, Nevada, a tobacco-soaked pustule of a settlement with a shameful electricity bill right across the border with California where we steamrolled over with three tons of German truck at around 1 a.m. on a recent Saturday in March. When we—my friend Andrew, our photographer friend Mark, and myself—arrived in town, it was five hours to green flags at the .

You may have heard that event “better than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one.” True statement.

that Mercedes unleashed on the world a few years ago. This is kind of that, minus two extra wheels.

Now we ran into a couple German guys in Nevada, who claimed to run a G-Class fan club back in their home country. According to them, the “backstory” of these nutso off-road super-versions is that Mercedes created the design for the military. Once they’d spent the money to do development and make the parts, they realized rich maniacs would probably buy these things for fun.

That’s conjecture of course; Mercedes’s official response to “Why?” is a coy “Why not?”, but I like the theory.

Also, the truck can swim. Water fording depth is over three feet.

Steering is heavy, but direct at low speed. On the highway you have to work pretty hard to keep it from wandering off and eating a car in another lane. Top speed is a claimed 130 mph, and to test that would be unbridled idiocy. The “sailboat in a storm” sensation gets pretty overwhelming around 80 mph on flat road.

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These days no writer should try to be Hunter S. Thompson. Even the drugged out Brooklyn hipster-journalists who try and emulate his shtick in the digital era are shades, pale imitations of the real thing. Plus, consuming enough drugs to pull off a proper tribute while holding a job is pretty well impossible these days. Even in journalism.

Instead I’ll merely quote the good doctor, because one more line of his from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wraps up the 4x4² so perfectly. The truck truly is: