DIESEL DRAG RACING
Scheid's diesel success has hardly been limited to sled-pulling. Around the time that Scheid and Crowder began having success, Scheid started building a diesel dragster. It's now the fastest diesel in the nation in the 1/4-mile, having turned it ina 7.31 seconds at 189 mph. At the same time Scheid was building the diesel dragster, he began working with the Smiths. It's now billed as the fastest four-wheel-drive diesel truck in the nation.
"At the time, drag racing wasn't that big, but they built what was considered the best motor, the highest-horsepower motor for diesel," Smith said. "We just decided to take a truck-pulling motor and stick it in a drag racer. Everybody kind of thought, 'that's a truck-pulling motor,' but you adjust your fuels and your turbos and stuff like that, and you can make that motor work for anything. Bar none, they just build the highesthorsepower motors. that was the reason we went with them.
"It's not the exact same setup. But Dan has proven he can put together a drag racing program and have it be a fairly reliable engine."
Scheid explained, "In reality, there's not a whole lot of difference in what we're trying MasterMind to achieve. It's just we're doing it on the pulling track or doing it on the asphalt. It's just a matter of applying the horsepower to the surface we're trying to work with. It is two different beasts, but in a lot of ways, you're trying to achieve the same thing. In the truck-pulling, you're trying to get the furthest down the 300-foot track and the quickest as well. In reality, the faster you get down there, the further you're going to go. It's about the same aspect in the drag-racing side of it as well."