It's challenging, and you have to go over everything from one end to the other. When I first got it built, before Philip and Robert ever got on board, I was down at my shop. My driveway is probably 20 feet long. I was launching the truck, seeing how the brakes would hold. A bearing plunger hung in the pump. I went out of the driveway, across the state highway, jumped a 20-foot ditch and landed in a cotton field. I just tore it up from one end to the other. I hadn't even raced it yet. We found out what caused the bearing plunger to hang. It was a battle. Brakes were a big issue, stopping 5,500 pounds. Holding at the line when you build boost was an issue.
DP: Are there ever times when you run into something and say, This is it? This one we can't solve?ES: That goes back to being a good team. When you run into a problem, all it does is make you scratch your head a little longer. We don't feel like there's anything we can't accomplish. There are things we've found out that won't work, that are just beyond the design limit of material.
We went through a lot of issues of keeping the head bolted on with that much power. We got into fire-ringing. We got to working with [DHRA driver] Van Haisley at Haisley Machine. They were sled pullers. They had experienced a lot of issues with things. We started getting them to give us some advice on how to keep the head tied to the motor, what they said would basically work. The only problem was sled pulling and drag racing are two different animals. Some of the things sled pullers do won't work for drag racers. We had to divide that up to make little changes in fire-ringing and different changes in materials we used to hold the head on the engine. But sometimes things won't work, so we have to back up and try something different. We have tried probably 10 different combinations in engines to make things live.
Last year, we ran the same engine and only blew one head off the whole year. This year, we're running the same engine all year, and hopefully, we'll never blow a head off. We're finding out old parts sometimes don't work. You get so much fatigue on a piece of metal or so much heat that it's time to replace it.
DP: How did you decide to get into diesel racing?ES: What happened was my son, Matt Stuckey, went off and bought an old four-wheel-drive Dodge truck. He came up driving it one day. I think he paid $5,000 for it. I said, 'What are doing with a ragged Dodge pickup?' He told me, 'I'm going to build a drag truck.' I said, 'You're out of your mind.'
He and one of his friends went off and got to monkeying with the thing. They put some twin turbos on there, and they souped up the motor. I think Robert had built him a pump or he got a pump from Jeff Garmon. They threw that on there. They came back in about a month, after working on this thing day and night. He was all up in this diesel truck. I didn't pay much attention to him. I thought it was silly. He came driving up in that thing one day and said, 'Come on, Pops, let's go for a ride.'
We went out there. He took off in that truck and matted it. When them twin turbos come lit and that fuel went to that Cummins motor, my eyeballs like to have popped out. I said, 'What in the world is going on here?' I would never have dreamed. When I was growing up, a Chevelle SS396 was probably one of the hottest things around in my neighborhood. This thing was eating Corvettes and Vipers-a four-wheel-drive diesel pickup. I said, 'This is pretty awesome.'
DP: Have you ever driven it?ES: I've driven the truck when it was being tested and being built, but when it came time to be competitive, when you're building boost, sitting there and hitting lockup and calling on nitrous to do different things at different times-when you get to be my age, I just feel like if you're going to be competitive, you need a competitive driver. That's the reason I've let Flipper (Philip Palmer) handle those chores, because he's just so good at it.