The Leader in Diesel Performance
David Downs Goliath at Baja
(From the Archives – Circa November 2004)
A virtually stock 2003 Cummins diesel-powered Dodge Ram 2500 4X4 Pickup truck takes 3rd Place in the “Stock Full” class at 2004 Baja 1000. The truck is equipped with Banks’ Six-Gun Bundle.
(From the Archives – 01.25.02)
I have a confession to make (I know some of you are into confessional mode). Before I started this job, I didn’t know how to use a computer as anything other than a typewriter. My computer at home is connected only to itself. I write to disc. If I had to email something, I handed the disc to my wife and asked her to do it, please.
(From the Archives – 03.01.02)
As I said in my introduction, the Friday Night News won’t necessarily talk about what’s happening this week at Gale Banks Engineering. We might talk about what’s happening now, what’s in the future, or what happened in the past. Here’s one from a decade and a half ago.
(From the Archives – 04.05.02)
You might think that discussing header flanges is about as exciting as listening to a lengthy dissertation on muffler bearings. In most cases, you’d be right. But when I toured the tube shop here at Banks, the first thing that got my attention were the header flanges. They’re the thickest and flattest I’ve ever seen. There are several reasons for this.
It might not look like it in these pictures, but, when these shots were taken, the Banks Top Diesel Dragster was only a few hours away from going into the trailer for its first trip to the test track.
Some of you might have had the chance to see the webcast, while others… well you were probably at work since it was in the middle of the day. For those of you who missed it, or were working for the man, I’ll post video on the whole thing once I get it in. There were great presentations from all of the panel members, including one from BMW explaining how today’s diesel works. Very simple explanation, and easily understood…
Azusa, California – – No, it’s not the Bayeux Tapestry, but perhaps it might be considered as the American motorsports equivalent of it.
It’s the colorful 63 and-a-half-foot long, five foot tall, timeline-history of Gale Banks Engineering that stretches a full 50 years and features over 400 illustrations that go all the way back to 1958!
Some 15 very eager students from the Centro Educativo Grupo Cedva in Mexico City recently toured the Banks facility in Azusa, California. They were given an up-close and personal look at many of the manufacturing processes: from design and prototyping, through production, right on to the boxing and shipping of the final product.
More than 50 members of the Society of Automotive Engineers gathered in the tech bay of Banks Power’s North Engineering building on Tuesday evening to listen to company president and founder Gale Banks speak about the many great aspects of high-performance diesel power. The attendees, gathered from all around southern California, represented a wide cross section of industry and academia. Automotive engineers from Honeywell, Subaru, General Motors, Nokia, Mazda, Denso, HR Textron, US Hybrid Corp., and more mingled well into the night with representatives from local universities Cal Poly Pomona and the University of Southern California.
Howdy thar, partners. A couple of blog entries back I gave the lowdown on Gale’s and my venture with Bosch in Las Vegas during the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles National Conference, but I didn’t get to write much about the demonstration vehicles we had there for our Ride & Drive event. Bosch has corralled a pretty impressive array of diesel steeds for the press to drive and write about. The idea is to get out not only the word but also the feeling one gets from driving any one of the examples of modern-day diesel – and to let people know that they’re available on the market today.