The Leader in Diesel Performance
I’m writing this from my hotel room in Sacramento, Ca. See, Gale and I were invited to participate in an event Bosch is putting on here at the state’s capital called California Diesel Days. The intention of this outing is to raise the awareness of the legislative group in the toughest and most mandated “Green” state in the Union…
Well, it’s been a long time coming but we finally were there: the Miami International Boat Show. Well… we visited the thing for a few years in a row as a guest of General Motors, but this year we were on display and officially showing off our marinized Duramax diesel engine which we will be testing soon.
Hey again guys and gals. I’m getting some questions as to how the stock intake manifold compares to the Banks Big Hoss manifold. I could go on and on about the details but I figured that a picture is worth a thousand words so here’s the comparison (if you can really call it that). I do need to point out here that these are for hardcore engine builds ONLY. This is for you guys wanting 1000hp+ without having to run 100psi of boost. This isn’t something you can bolt on in an hour for your daily driver. These parts are straight off our drag race/road race trucks. Caution: LOTS OF PICTURES!
Gale Banks himself just arrived. As you can imagine it didn’t take long for the group of people looking at the truck to immediately start talking with Gale. I have to admit that working for Gale Banks is a little strange, but in a good way. Growing up, my father, an old school hot-rodder himself would talk about him all the time. He would tell me how fast his engines were, how many world records he had, show me articles in Hot Rod magazine about him. Heck he even had one of Gale’s early twin turbo systems for our boat, and now I work for “the man” himself.
It’s Saturday March 7th 2009 and we’re back at the SpeedWorld drag strip in Wittman Arizona. It’s time to go racing. Being as this is my first diesel only event I’m really not sure what to expect. Oh sure, I’ve been to some NHRA events before, but the only diesels there were in the parking lot and were hooked up to the race trailers. Here we’ve got both. Diesel trucks towing trailers loaded with, well, diesel trucks. Ok, not all of them. The crew from Texas Diesel Power just arrived with their diesel powered Funny Car, and another crew just showed up with a diesel powered “rat-rod”. I must admit both of those cars are so very cool, I’d love to go over and check them both out, but we have work to do.
Seven seconds. It doesn’t sound like a long period of time does it? Think about it for a minute. Seven seconds. It actually takes longer then seven seconds to even write out the words “seven seconds”. It takes me longer than that to unlock my truck, put on my seat belt, and start the ignition. But in the short span of just about seven seconds, the Banks Sidewinder S-10 drag truck has gone from a dead stop to over 180 miles per hour…
In the fall of 2008 this magnificent machine came “home” to the Banks tech shop for a short, regularly-scheduled maintenance visit. Of course we are using the terms “regular” and “maintenance” with some relativity here.
There are thirty-four engines presently taking up just about every spare square foot of the race car shop floor here at Banks.
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.
At precisely 8 a.m. the new Banks Sidewinder Duramax-powered diesel dragster stopped being a great idea, a few photos, some artist conceptions, a big stack of PO’s, a bunch of invoices, about a hundred faxes and an equal number of phone calls back and forth to Greenfield, Ind., and actually became a tangible object, a real, honest-to-goodness racing car, all 31.5 feet of it.