Bum Motorsports’ TrophyKart Review: Mini Off Road Trucks With Real Race Truck Energy
Bum Motorsports TrophyKart during off-road testing
Publisher: 10FoldMoto • Author/Writer: Robert Couture
Excerpt: Bum Motorsports’ TrophyKart is one of the coolest mini off-road truck builds online right now. What starts as a tiny race-style truck with real suspension turns into a chaotic supercharger experiment, rough off-road test session, and eventually a far more serious dual-motor electric project. Small scale, real fabrication, and huge trophy truck energy make this one worth watching.
Brief Summary / Teaser: The Bum Motorsports TrophyKart build is one of the most interesting mini off road truck projects online right now. It starts as a professionally built small-scale race truck with real suspension hardware, then gets pushed through backyard testing, janky supercharger experiments, and a full electric dual-motor transformation. It’s small, but it carries real trophy truck attitude.
Why the Bum Motorsports TrophyKart stands out
Some builds are fun because they’re polished. This one is fun because it’s not pretending to be.
The Bum Motorsports TrophyKart video shows a machine that’s tiny in scale but serious in layout. It uses proper fabrication, race-style geometry, quality shocks, and a chassis that looks more like a scaled desert racer than a toy. That’s what makes it interesting.
This isn’t just a mini truck with oversized tires and a cool name. It’s built like a real machine, then treated like one.
What a TrophyKart actually is
A TrophyKart is basically a junior or scaled-down off road truck built to mimic the feel, suspension movement, and racing attitude of a full-size trophy truck. In this case, the Bum Motorsports machine looks like the smallest trophy truck you could reasonably buy, but it still has the details that matter.
Real suspension and race-style construction
According to the transcript, this little truck came with Bilstein shocks, a properly welded chassis, upgraded steering, and a compact single-cylinder engine package. That matters because the whole appeal of a mini off road truck is whether it actually behaves like a race truck, not whether it just looks like one.
And from the way it’s described and tested, this one does.
The stock setup was cool, but underpowered
The original engine setup gave the truck character, but not much urgency.
Bum Motorsports describes the 301 as basically a lawn mower engine with a proper exhaust. That’s part of the charm, honestly. It sounds better than it has any right to, and it fits the rough, mechanical feel of the project. But once they started actually driving it, the limits showed up fast.
Where the stock setup struggled
The stock powertrain looked weak in a few key areas:
Low torque and slow acceleration
Even with their supercharger experiment, the truck still felt lazy. It had that familiar small-engine problem where it eventually gets moving, but getting there takes too long.
CVT and belt stress
Once boost and extra load entered the picture, the CVT became a problem. The added pulley setup and belt load pushed the system harder than it really wanted.
Tight packaging
The truck was cramped before modification, and the supercharger setup made that worse. Seat position, clearance, and packaging all became part of the problem.
That’s a good reminder for any mini off road truck build. Packaging matters just as much as power.
The Amazon supercharger experiment was chaotic, but interesting
This was easily one of the most entertaining parts of the build.
They mounted a tiny Amazon supercharger onto the little 301 setup, fabricated brackets, reworked the intake path, experimented with push-through versus draw-through carb placement, changed jets, swapped carburetors, and kept pushing until the thing finally ran. It was messy, improvised, and exactly the kind of garage engineering people actually watch for.
Why this part of the project worked as content
It worked because it showed real problem-solving instead of pretending the first idea was correct.
They had to:
remove chassis pieces for space
build a pulley system off the CVT
fabricate custom mounts
revise the intake routing
change from a push-through system to a draw-through setup
rejet and eventually switch to a larger carburetor
verify boost with a gauge
That’s real builder content. Not polished. Not fake. Just trying things until the machine responds.
Note: The supercharger setup reportedly made around 10 psi of boost during testing, but the packaging and CVT load made it a poor long-term solution for this chassis.
The best part was seeing the truck actually driven off road
A lot of projects look good in the shop and fall apart in the dirt. This one at least made it into the real world.
Once Bum Motorsports took the truck out for testing, the suspension looked like the real highlight. The truck handled whoops, survived jump attempts, and genuinely looked planted for something this small. Even when the powertrain felt underwhelming, the chassis and suspension still gave the machine credibility.
Why that matters
That’s the difference between a novelty build and a platform worth developing.
A weak engine can be replaced. A bad chassis usually isn’t worth saving.
Here, the opposite happened. The chassis looked worth keeping, which is probably why the project evolved instead of dying.
Then the project got way more serious
The biggest pivot is what makes this build worth following.
After realizing the gas engine setup was too slow and too fragile for the goals of the project, Bum Motorsports moved toward a dual-motor electric setup. That changes everything.
Instead of trying to squeeze more life out of a small gas engine and stressed CVT, they started building what sounds like a serious electric mini trophy truck with custom hubs, sprocket adapters, a fabricated rear axle, dual motors, dual controllers, and a much more intentional powertrain layout.
Why the electric version makes more sense
For a mini off road truck, electric can solve a lot of the exact issues the gas setup struggled with.
Better low-speed torque
This is probably the biggest advantage. Small off road trucks need immediate punch more than they need highway speed.
Simpler tuning path
Instead of dealing with jets, carb behavior, boost plumbing, and belt compromise, electric lets them focus more on gearing, controller setup, traction, and chassis behavior.
Packaging upside
Electric swaps are never easy, but if done right, they can remove some of the awkward compromises that came from trying to supercharge a tiny industrial engine inside a cramped cabin.
Guesstimating the performance potential
This is where things get fun.
I’m guesstimating here, but a lightweight dual-motor electric TrophyKart could become a genuinely violent little machine if the gearing, battery output, and traction all line up. Depending on the exact motor and controller specs, it could easily move from “fun novelty” into “seriously fast” territory.
Rough guesstimation
Based on the direction of the build, I’d guesstimate this thing could eventually land somewhere in the range of:
20 to 40+ kW
27 to 54+ hp
massive low-end wheel torque relative to size
That’s the kind of setup that can make a mini off road truck feel way faster than the numbers suggest. Lightweight electric builds tend to hit hard, and in something this small, even modest power can feel absurd.
For anyone interested in how power, voltage, and output interact on EV builds, the 10FoldMoto EV Motorcycle DC Power Calculator is useful for understanding the numbers before parts start flying around the shop.
Why people care about mini off road trucks like this
Because they compress the best parts of build culture into a smaller, cheaper, weirder package.
You still get:
suspension development
drivetrain experimentation
fabrication work
off-road testing
real problem-solving
a machine that looks cool even when it fails
That combination is hard to fake. It’s why the Bum Motorsports TrophyKart content works. It has the same emotional pull as full-size off road builds, just in a more compact and slightly more ridiculous form.
And that’s a compliment.
Final thoughts on Bum Motorsports’ TrophyKart
The best part of this project is that it didn’t stop at “good enough.”
The stock mini truck was already cool. The supercharger phase was entertaining. But the electric transformation is the part that could turn this from a funny mini off road truck into a genuinely impressive machine.
That’s where this project gets interesting.
It stopped being just a tiny trophy truck and started becoming a real engineering story. That’s the kind of thing we pay attention to at 10FoldMoto.
We make powerful things understandable, and make understanding empowering.
If you like weird fabrication, off-road machines, and builder-first content that actually shows the messy middle, this is one worth following.
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Posted Date: 3, 30, 2026.
Last Updated: 3, 23, 2026.
