On some Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays this semester, Ali Mansour’s red 1995 Chevrolet G 71 occupies a corner space in the Kenan Auditorium parking lot.

A parked car rarely slows down traffic as people gawk. But the junior geography major’s vehicle is one of the largest street-legal trucks on the East Coast. Its roof stands nearly 10 feet above the road surface.

Mansour raised the truck 32 inches over its factory lift. The bottoms of the doors meet his shoulder. He even developed a special jump and roll to get inside the cab and behind the wheel.

It’s so tall a low-riding truck once parked it. No wonder its license plate reads AMONSTER.

“I can see over UPS trucks and I can see over those big Coke-distributing trucks, stuff like that,” Mansour said. “I’m right about as tall as semi’s eye-level.” He also owns a monstrous menagerie of mean machines: A 1996 white Hummer. “I’ve got the real one, not the little H2, another lifted Chevrolet G 71 (which is black), a Jeep Cherokee and a Unimog, a Mercedes-built army truck.”

Since I was a little kid, I always liked them,” Mansour said about large vehicles. “Since I was probably five years old, I wanted a big truck. Just anything huge.”

On campus and around Wilmington, a number of the vehicles may arrive on his class days. But the red Chevy draws the most attention.

“A lot of times people slam on brakes. People don’t know what it is,” Mansour said. “I had some lady pull off on the side of the road. It’s wild. … My dad’ s been a car collector since I’ve been a baby and followed me in the Dodge Viper and hasn’t yet gotten the looks this thing has.”

On campus, that leads to a small-scale notoriety. Folks driving aroundcampus slow down. Many people wave.

“A lot of people know me from the truck. It makes me feel like a small-time celebrity,” Mansour said. “People don’ t know who I am, but they do know the red truck. It’ s become like a joke.”

Mansour largely keeps his truck on the street, despite a little four-wheeling near his house, and uses his other vehicles for rugged recreation. Most people who have trucks like this build them strictly for off-road use.

“I wanted something I could drive down the street and the biggest street-legal truck I could find or you’d ever see around,” Mansour said. To date, I haven’t seen anything on the road that’s been bigger than mine that hasn’t been pulled behind a trailer. Everything’ s underneath it it’s real dependable.”

How dependable?

“If there weren’ t those darn laws, I’d runover everybody.”