Drag Week Diesel Truck Bracket Racing Competition

Ever head out to the dragstrip on a Friday or Saturday night and think, "Gosh, this is great. I wish I could do this every day!" Welcome to Hot Rod magazine's Drag Week. The rules are pretty basic: Vehicles have to be street-legal and insured, have a horn, wipers, and lights, and drive to five tracks in five days. Anything you bring must either be kept in your vehicle or on a trailer; there are no support vehicles allowed.

To make things more interesting, Hot Rod broke down the cars and trucks into various other classes for vehicles running without nitrous, with street tires, and so on. Diesel Power tagged along with four diesels competing in the Bracket Race class, which included 73 cars and featured a race on the final day where the 32 quickest cars (and trucks) would run to determine the overall winner.

With the diesel engine having a legendary reputation for reliability, we figured Drag Week would be smooth sailing for us. Three transmissions, three sets of injectors, two flat tires, some bad fuel, and numerous other mishaps later, we thought differently. Welcome to the story of Drag Week '07.

Day Zero: Test 'n' TuneGreg Hogue and our own Project X were back this year, along with newcomers Brian Carter (who finished in Second Place at our Diesel Power Challenge East event in 2006) and Andy Thomas with his '99 Ram that is set up to run in the 12.0 Quick Diesel class at DHRA events. Steve Bowyer also made the trek all the way from Arizona to compete in this event. We figured Project X had a good chance of being a repeat winner for Drag Week's quickest diesel, until Brian Carter and his new motor clicked off an 11.50 quarter-mile pass in testing with only one stage of nitrous. Not only that, Andy was making pass after pass in the low 12s while Project X was running tire-spinning high 12s. It looked like it could be a three-horse race (Steve's mostly stock truck was running low 16s), after all.

One of the biggest thrashes of Drag Week was about to happen, only we didn't know it yet. While we were at dinner after testing, Brian reported to us that his truck was just blowing through the transmission. After a few boosted launches on a side street next to a police station (thank you, nice police officer, for not giving us a ticket), the transmission was deemed toast, and Brian was stuck without a transmission the night before Drag Week began. We tried making a few phone calls without much luck. There simply wasn't time. Or was there?

Andy was a big booster of the Goerend transmission that was in his truck, and Dave Goerend's St. Lucas, Iowa, shop was only about a three-hour drive away. Dave and his shop foreman, Craig Kuehner, came through, and at about 9 p.m., the decision was made to make the drive. Project X was under the knife also, as the low-tech approach of adding two 98-pound tractor weights was being used with the hope that the truck would hook up better the next day.

Day One: Cordova, IllinoisFor Brian Carter, Andy Thomas, and us, the first day of Drag Week started at Goerend about midnight. We loaded the transmission into the back of Andy's Dodge. (Andy was nice enough to put an extra 400 miles on his truck to lend Brian Carter a hand.) Diesel Power then took the wheel (we were still on California time) and drove back to Cordova, Illinois, where we finally arrived at about 4 a.m. Enough good can't be said about Illinois Dyno Center; using their lift made it possible for Brian to continue on. When all was said and done, the last quart of transmission fluid was put in at about 8:45 a.m., just in time for the 9 a.m. drivers' meeting.