Cummins Side Draft Intake – Banks’ Secret Weapon Returns

00:00 Look at this. 25–67 Cummins. One side draft manifold extracted. It’s hard to imagine—I came up with this 24 years ago. This was around ’01, and I ran across a guy named John Stang. Turns out John Stang ran the Cummins Skunk Works back then.

00:24 Cummins stock was like $27 a share. It was extremely low. They needed a shot in the arm. And I said, you also need younger stockholders. How about making Cummins stock kind of in vogue? They were doing a common rail version of the 5.9 to come out in ’03. I said, “Man, that injection technology rocks.”

00:41 My evaluation was, why don’t we do the common rail? And we do it in a pickup truck. I found some records and thought, we can break these records if we go 210 mph. How do we get enough horsepower to set those records?

00:59 I wanted the thing to be streetable. I wanted it to pull our pit trailer—with all our tools, our workbench, our wheels and tires, our quick-change gears, all that stuff. They agreed, but they had no budget. “Yeah, we’ll give you a couple of used dyno engines.” They made about 404 horsepower. We put it on our dyno—402. Within a couple horsepower. So we knew we were in agreement with Cummins Engineering.

01:16 We started at 400 and change and decided this thing’s got an airflow problem. If we want to go further, we’ve got to do something about airflow. We looked at the intake manifold and went, “That’s got to go,” because we wanted to port those intake ports. We modified the head, designed casting for the Big Hoss side draft, and fabricated an exhaust manifold.

01:48 When we were done, we had 735 horsepower at about 3,100 RPM. Called up the guys at Cummins and told them. Their first reaction: “Oh, you’re bullshitting me.” That was the first engineer I talked to.

02:08 We put it in the truck, automatic trans, and drove to Bonneville. Drove onto the salt, made it a racer, and I was driving it to the starting line with a country radio station on. We broke the record on the first run, but it had to be a two-way average. Our best two-way average was 217. Our best one-way out the back door at the end of the fifth mile was 222.

02:25 There it is: the world’s first side draft Cummins manifold for a B-series Cummins 5.9. This is the record engine. I’ve decided to bring back the Big Hoss—specifically designed to fit the 6.7—and do it as a casting. I also want it to be affordable.

02:46 Cummins didn’t participate in the cost of building this truck at all. I did it because I was nuts for diesel. I still am.