The deep foundation industry is going through huge changes and innovations in terms of design, installation, and testing for concrete bored piles or drilled shafts. 1200 mm and 1500 mm diameter piles which were large diameters are now normal and the new norm for large diameter is increasingly called 1600 mm and onwards up to 2500 mm or even more. This has increased requirements of validation of capacity and integrity for such large diameters and large loads. The current paper describes the installation of 1800 mm diameter piles to 50 m depth for a project of national repute and the challenges encountered during the same. The pile was required to be tested to 53600kN. Thus instrumented static load test with reaction piles was planned for such a huge load test that required special planning and fabrication of girders, and the design of reaction piles to ensure capacity in uplift. The paper describes the findings of such a test that was successfully executed at the project.