This is the kind of race truck you build when you own a 9-second diesel street truck. It turns out Bill Fletcher's record-breaking white truck you just read about was only the beginning of his Cummins-engine racing program. While the rest of the country is trying to break into the 9s with their trucks, Bill's latest creation is on the hunt for the 8s-and possibly the 7s.
To the best of our knowledge, Bill is the first person to run a sub-10-second quarter-mile in a street-legal diesel. Although that's a very impressive achievement, running a truck that was originally designed as a towing workhorse down a dragstrip comes with a whole host of issues. Most of those issues come from track officials who insist on a number of safety and licensing credentials before the truck can be run on their asphalt. Ironically, the success of his white truck has led to it being forced to sit on the trailer at some strips. But Bill isn't the type of individual to let a little disappointment spoil all the fun, so he decided to build a second diesel truck specifically for drag racing.
The Chassis
With the new truck concept still an idea in his head, Bill was fortunate to find a used Jerry Bickel Dakota-bodied rolling chassis for sale. A deal was put together with the previous owner in North Carolina, and Bill went to Denver to pick up the roller. The Bickel chassis had previously been raced in NHRA competition, so the majority of the components were already race legal-it just needed a diesel engine. With all his experience working with the Cummins 12-valve engine in his white truck, another 12-valve was the obvious choice to power the new racer.
Not just any old 12-valve would live up to Bill's standards, though. It had to be built to the max and be capable of powering the truck through the quarter-mile in the 7-second range. Bill and his son met with the guys from PDR and began building the powerplant. We're going to disappoint you yet again and say that Bill wouldn't give away any of his motor-building secrets. The only thing he did say was that the engine will rev to roughly 6,800 rpm.
The Engine
A compound setup was custom fabricated using a set of one-off Holset turbos that were modified at the company's facility in England. Both turbos are hybrids, and the larger bottom turbo sits inside the cab in the passenger foot well. No intercooler is used, and the turbos force air into a twin-inlet, custom manifold on the passenger side of the block.
A digital nitrous kit from NOS feeds a progressive amount of nitrous into the intake manifold during runs. According to Bill, the cooling effect from the nitrous will act as the intercooler. Fueling comes from a modified PDR P7100 injection pump feeding Industrial Injection Super Dragon Flow injectors. A custom 47RE transmission from Suncoast connects the incredible power from the motor to the driveline and Mark Williams 9-inch rear axle.
Inside the cab, there is one racing seat and a billet shifter from Precision Performance Products to control the Suncoast transmission. A plethora of Auto Meter gauges display every imaginable bit of information, and a data-acquisition system records critical engine and drivetrain data for viewing at a later time. With so much power and so little weight, it's likely Bill will be pretty focused on keeping the truck pointed down the strip and not looking at gauges.
The chassis of this truck was built by renowned drag-race fabricator Jerry Bickel and features a lightweight chromoly tube frame with a carbon-fiber cab and front clip. The complete truck with engine is said to weigh 2,400 pounds and is legal in the Top Sportsman category of NHRA racing. Bill estimates the engine will put out roughly 1,400 hp, so the finished product should be one of the quickest diesel trucks in the world. Bill and his team are currently putting the finishing touches on the truck and going through the final stages of the NHRA technical-inspection process. The truck should be hitting the strips sometime this year, and after a few test-and-tune sessions at Pacific Raceways in Seattle, Bill will campaign the truck in the NHRA series. If the specifications on this truck and his previous racing experience in his white street truck are anything to go by, this Dakota will likely take diesel trucks into a whole new realm of quarter-mile times.