Team Green's 1,200hp, 12-valve...
Team Green's 1,200hp, 12-valve Cummins engine is reported to be a budget buildup. Crewchief Robert claims there's less than $4,000 in the engine.
People on the West Coast like Bill Fletcher [owner of another 9-second diesel truck] calling and talking to me on the telephone. I say, 'Where'd you get my number?' He'd say, 'Oh, I know people who know you.' That lets me know the sport has grown to more of a magnitude than I ever thought it would at this point in the game. Basically, it's about a three- to four-year thing. Three years ago, there was a handful of anything going on. Now, you pick up a Diesel Power magazine and it's full of people building products for diesel. You've got young boys, people all over the country, who are buying diesel pickups now. They wouldn't have been buying diesel pickups if it hadn't been for diesel racing-the performance end. We took the Green Truck to Bowling Green, Kentucky, and ran three 9s, including a 9.85 at 145 mph. We made three 9-second passes in one day. I don't think anyone has ever done that. We hold a national e.t. and a national mph record. People can say they have run a 9.92, but they've only done it once. We did it three times in one weekend. But I'm real excited about the whole end of diesel sports, and I'm just proud to be a part of it out there participating and helping it grow.
DP: Talk about the Green Truck a minute. Where did you get it?ES: The Green Truck we bought from [DHRA driver] Jeff Garmon. It was a long-wheelbase, a '94 Dodge Ram 2500. I think the man who owned it was in the concrete business. It was pretty beat up. I asked Jeff, 'Do you reckon it will make it to South Georgia from Atlanta?' He said, 'Well, I've been driving it for two weeks. I believe it will make it.' I did make it home with it. Once it made it to the Georgia, we stripped everything down, cut it in half, and back-halved the rearend.
There has been a ton of speculation...
There has been a ton of speculation on the Internet and at the racetracks about what makes the Green Truck so fast. To keep the competition guessing, Robert whipped up story about his top-secret Chunchit Valve. The Chunchit is really nothing more than a prop that Robert carries around in his pocket. But don't let the cover story fool you-it could be part of Team Green's psychological warfare.
When we started building the truck, it was really one of the first two-wheel-drive trucks being built. We really didn't have a clue what we were doing and where we were headed. We put a Dana 60 rearend in it. After five races, and after we had screwed the pinion out of the rearend of the truck twice, we figured out a Dana 60 was not going to hold that kind of power or torque. That's when we were around 800 hp. We finally wound up with a Ford Pro Series 9-inch rearend in it. We went through a lot of transmission and torque-converter problems as horsepower increased from 700 to 800 to 900 to 1,000. Then we hit 1,250 hp, and it has just been a growing experiment. Every time we increased power, we had to increase every other product on the truck.
DP: It has to be fascinating, being on the cutting edge of an industry.ES: That falls back to having a crew like Robert at Shiver Diesel. Those people have 25-30 years of experience in their business. If you didn't have a team like that, you would just battle and beat your head against the wall. People all get together. We've experimented with transmissions. Sun Coast, with Joe Webb-before he died-he loved that Green Truck. He helped us in every way-developing input shafts, torque converters. And as it increased, we figured out this would fail or that would fail. We just had to keep changing.
We're at a point now where we've actually detuned the truck a little bit to get reliability. We had a transmission torque converter we built. It worked fine for two races, and when we tore it down, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. We refreshed everything, put it in, and went to Kentucky, and the first pass, it gives up somewhere around the 30-foot mark. It didn't shift right. Well, with that much power-you go throwing 2,100 or 2,200 lb-ft of torque to something-if it slips in any way, it's burnt up. That's what happened. Something didn't happen absolutely right, whether it was the transmission, the driver, the track, or whatever-it caused a little problem. Everything is so critical that you have to go over every issue. Everything has to be perfect, pretty much, to make it live at that much power.