Thirty-Four ENGINES
There are thirty-four engines presently taking up just about every spare square foot of the race car shop floor here at Banks.
The Leader in Diesel Performance
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.
Power is an interesting and cruel mistress: Get a taste of it and not only do you want more, but you often spend valuable brain cells and neurons scheming of a way to get it. Call it lust — and an addiction if you will. Power can come in many forms, but I’m of course thinking of horsepower. Being who I am, where I’ve worked and what I’m surrounded by on a daily basis, it’s no wonder I have these thoughts fermenting in my skull. Be it for work or for personal gratification, I can’t stop thinking about the mechanisms that can bring about “more.”
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.
You know the feeling when you have a cold and your nose is all plugged and it’s a doggone burden to even breathe? Well, I imagine that is kinda how your vehicle must feel day after day with the stock intake and exhaust system that it was born with. It doesn’t stop there, because if it’s turbocharged, it just might have a terribly restrictive intercooler to boot. With all of the backup in airflow, it’s a wonder your vehicle even moves, and with you behind the wheel demanding more performance to move around that Sunday driver in front of you, the situation is only exasperated
Q: When did the first turbocharged car appear at the Indy 500?
A: It was in 1952, and the car was not only turbocharged but it was a Cummins diesel – a first for both!
I spent last weekend (not this one that just passed but the other one) in Las Vegas with my buddies from Bosch. We were in the city of sin to set up Bosch’s Learning Center for the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles National Conference that was being held there. It’s kind of hard to think of diesel as an “alternative” fuel since it’s been around for such a long time, but it’s lumped into the same category as all of the future fuels that are making headlines these days. I’m going to list these different fuels in an upcoming blog and go over what makes them real – or just plain wishful thinking…