Once he straps into the cockpit, though, there’s not enough time to worry about anything but making a clean pass. “There’s a lot to do,” he says, “a lot to worry about as far as spooling up and nitrous and lock-ups and transmission things, but the guys at our transmission shop, Suncoast Performance, have got it to where it’s a whole lot smoother than it used to be. Everything is dialed in, but you stay busy in there, you’ve got plenty of buttons to mash.”
Up front, the big Dodge sports an inline-six Cummins diesel that started life at 359 cubic inches and produced about 170 horsepower. “It’s real Dodge diesel power, but this one has only about a one millimeter overbore, which is 40 thousandths, so it’s probably something like a 362 now,” Palmer says, adding it puts out horsepower “in the 1,200 range now” and “torque measured at about 2,100 to 2,200 foot pounds.”
Stuckey says the truck is on its third block and its water jackets are now filled with concrete in order to combat the high compression that a racing diesel engine requires. “There’s no water in the block at all,” he says, “just in the head.”
The Cummins 5.9 liter diesel comes stock with a turbocharger, so according to DHRA Pro Street rules, only something like a second turbo or nitrous injection would be considered a power adder. “Right now we run one turbo and nitrous, so that’s a single power adder,” Palmer explains. “We have nitrous injection on the intercooler and in the turbo, so we can run two stages with one on a timer.”
And although the truck is extremely reliable and fast now, crew chief Donalson says it didn’t always come easy. “The problem you get to when you get to this level is that nobody builds parts for these limits. So you have to find one weak link at a time,” he says.
“That’s the problem you have with this class,” Palmer confirms. “It’s a heavyweight class and the amount of torque you need to get that much weight moving that fast breaks parts. That’s the main thing in this game, to find ways not to break parts and fortunately we’ve done that this year.”