2003 Dodge Ram 2500 - Diesel vs. Muscle Car

At that point, all we had to do was blast back to Cordova and make a high 11-second run and we figured we could win the whole deal. That Ford GT parked behind us (driven by Jay Brown) would prove to make that very difficult. We took our time getting back to Cordova, and, miraculously, we checked into our hotel before midnight.

Day Five: Now people were really starting to notice us. Back at Cordova, hordes of people were coming up to the truck and asking Hogue "How could it be so fast?" We joked that racing a diesel felt like cheating. Even though our truck weighed more than everything else in the race, our Cummins could also take twice the beating of any other engine there. Our strategy was to run an 11.91-second pass and hand in the time slip to give us a theoretical perfect 12.00 average for the three days. There was just one problem: the truck kept running quicker (top of page). Hogue laid down pass after pass in the 11s. But it seemed like no matter how he drove, it laid down an 11.80-something, which would be too quick to count.

Hogue figured out immediately that Jay Brown, in his bone-stock Ford GT, was the man to beat. That guy kept making pass after pass (19 on that day alone!) in the low 12s/high 11s trying to target that perfect 12-second average. All right, two could play at that game! Hogue started making rapid-fire passes, but he could only make three runs, and then we'd have to wait in line to have the nitrous bottle refilled.

In the end, we were able to hand in a 12.01-second pass to give us an average of 12.03 for the three tracks. That was good enough for fifth place in the Eaton Daily Driver 12.00 class and earned us an award for Quickest Diesel. OK, so we were the only diesel. We should have also gotten an award for Quickest Six-Cylinder because the next quickest six-cylinder car (a Buick Grand National) averaged 13.19. Oh well. There's always next year.

To celebrate our victory (and plan for next year), we grabbed a bite to eat outside of Moline, Illinois, on that Friday afternoon. Out of the 199 vehicles that registered for Hot Rod's Drag Week, 121 showed up and only 76 finished. And only one did it all, fueled up with Rudolph's #2 Diesel, and drove 1,000 miles back to Texas. We win.