West Coast
Chris Sutton, a West Coast-based diesel sled puller, is not only a competitor, he is the President of the Diesel Pulling Organization in California.
Diesel Power: How did you get into diesel sled pulling? This is a relatively young sport. What piqued your interest?
Chris Sutton: I bought my truck in 1999. When I first got it, I looked on the Internet and found the TDR (Turbo Diesel Register). I just kind of pushed it away and didn't think about it. About six months later, I got back on there. I was just curious to see maintenance things, if guys were having issues. I found out that a guy in Half Moon Bay, California, named Nowel Thomas, had a business selling parts for horsepower upgrades. I got hold of him, and we hit it off. He was really into the diesel stuff before he passed away.
DP: He was influential in the DHRA, was he not?
CS: He was all for it. I'm for it, too, because they're big in the Midwest. I'm not a member, but I probably should be.
DP: So if the DHRA achieved its goal of eventually becoming a national sanctioning body, you'd be for it?
CS: I'm for it. There are a couple of rules I think they might need to change, and that's only because, out here, we allow nitrous and propane. We did that because the Dodges always won. If you let the Ford guys use propane and nitrous, they would do much better. It would be much better for everybody, including the fans. We decided we'd allow that, and I see no reason not to do that. There are enough people to do it to form a class specifically for it.
DP: Why sled pulling and not drag racing?
CS: I grew up in Nebraska. A county fair came to a town five miles from where I lived. They had the tractor tug of wars and the horses pulling the sleds. I knew about it, so I said, "OK, why not? Why not hook my truck up and see what will happen?" I went that route because I had a four-wheel drive and Nowel had the race truck. It didn't make sense for me to be competing against him.
DP: What is it about the West Coast that fosters that camaraderie?
CS: We're tight-knit, and we're not meeting a whole crop of new guys all the time. We know who everybody is. When you go back to the Midwest, everybody wants to do better than everybody else. Once you're connected with one of those businesses, everybody goes hush-hush. They don't want their secrets going to the other guys.
DP: Like a lot of diesel competitors nationally, the California sled pullers had some problems early on.
CS: We went to the pulls that were put on by the Valley Tractor Pullers Association. When Adam Sprague and I joined in 2001, they would push us. We'd have our drivers meeting, and we'd have a schedule of who's pulling where. And invariably, we'd get pushed around. We'd be scheduled to go after one set of tractors, and the next thing you know, we'd be pushed back to the end.
DP: And they also would lump the diesel trucks all in one class, which obviously doesn't work.
CS: That happened a few times. It didn't matter what modifications you had on your truck. They'd say, "Diesel truck? OK, you have one 8,500-pound class, and you're in it whether you like it or not. You don't like it? Don't pull.
DP: At that point, it's hardly worth doing.
CS: It's not fun for the guys who don't have the trucks capable of being competitive. It's frustrating when you go to a pull, and you have a set of injectors, and you've maybe ground a plate-you can't compete with the guys who have big injectors and big turbos. That's one reason we started the Diesel Pulling Organization. We want to have classes. We want guys to come off the street, pull, and feel like they were competitive.
DP: How many times did you hear that, that you wouldn't be competitive?
CS: (Laughing) Quite a few in the beginning. Quite a few.
DP: Was that part of the fun of this at the beginning, the proving people wrong?
CS: Absolutely. You'd drive around in your diesel truck and put a hurt on people, even on Corvettes and stuff on the street. You could put a hurt on guys in suped-up cars-BMWs and Porsches-that was fun. And it still is fun.
DP: There seems to be an element in the diesel world that once you try this, it sort of gets its hooks in you. What is it about diesel that people like so much?
CS: It's a big-time hook. It's a little bit because nobody expects it out of a diesel, but that's getting less and less prevalent. Also, most of these guys are horsepower junkies. A lot of guys who bought diesels are farmers and ranchers, they bought them so they could haul stuff. Then they said, "Oh, I can take my truck down to the sled pull at the county fair." Then they do well and they think, "Oh, my gosh." For as many people that modify their trucks and do this, there are as many people who don't. They may modify their truck a little bit, but the horsepower guys-the guys who really want to sled pull-they're only bound by their wallet. And maybe a wife.
DP: Diesel competition is still a relatively new phenomenon. A lot of the guys doing it now will probably be remembered as founding fathers of the sport, so to speak. Do you feel like an innovator, a trailblazer?
CS: I'm not sure I'm an innovator. I started the DPO, but I did that with Bryan Kinney and Scott Vorhees. Even though I'm the president, there was no voting. I put out the forms and we got it going, so an innovator? At one point, Nowel and I did things to my truck that were pretty fresh, but we were adapting what drag racers were doing. What we want to do is keep giving guys incentive to keep pulling. If I didn't do it, somebody would probably step up.