Pikes Peak is a long, high-altitude torture test. You are not making one short pull. You are asking the engine, turbo system, cooling package, and chassis to stay together while air density keeps falling and the load stays on. That is why the move from Old Smokey to an LMP car matters. The EcoDiesel made sense here because it is compact, lighter than a Cummins inline-six, and already has aftermarket support for the hard parts needed in a serious build. In this case, the engine package includes forged rods, a built CP4, and our cast-aluminum EcoDiesel intake manifold to get rid of the stock plastic manifold and its internal butterfly restriction. The goal is not just peak power. It is usable, reliable power with enough turbo and cooling headroom to survive the climb. Put that engine in a Le Mans Prototype chassis and the whole package changes. You get real downforce, better aero, and a platform built around speed instead of compromise. On a mountain where the upper section gets rough, the air gets thin, and every mistake costs time, that combination is what gives a diesel a real shot at going quicker.
Scott Birdsall, owner and lead fabricator at Chuckles Garage in Santa Rosa, California, joined Gale Banks to discuss his diesel racing projects and his return to Pikes Peak. Birdsall's shop focuses on custom chassis work, suspension, restoration, custom mounts, and sheet-metal fabrication. The shop name is a tribute to his father, Charles, whose friends called him Chuck and whose police nickname and CB handle was "Chuckles." After his father passed away in 2005, Birdsall started the business and named it in his honor.
Birdsall grew up in Fort Bragg, California, after his father transferred there from Ontario as a police officer. He later returned to Santa Rosa, but not without hardship. During the 2017 Northern California fires, he lost nearly everything he owned. His house burned, along with several prized vehicles, including a restored 1962 Buick Wildcat, a clean Lexus SC300, and an exceptionally clean second-generation Dodge dually with a P-pump Cummins and only 70,000 miles. The one major vehicle that survived was his race truck, Old Smokey, because it happened to be stored elsewhere at the time.
Old Smokey began as a humble 1949 Ford F1, the original precursor to the F-100 and the first of the F-Series line. Birdsall bought the truck on Craigslist for just $225, initially intending to clean it up and flip it for a profit. After pressure-washing it and parking it in the corner of the shop, he kept looking at it and eventually decided it deserved more than a quick resale.
The first plan was simple: install an extra 12-valve Cummins and turn it into a useful shop truck. That modest idea escalated quickly. The truck received an independent front suspension, larger brakes, and then progressively more ambitious turbocharging. A bigger turbo led to compound turbos, and then to larger compounds. At one stage, the 12-valve even ran a Roots supercharger ahead of the turbo system, feeding the atmospheric turbo to improve spool-up. Birdsall explained that the blower was effective in helping the system come on boost, but eventually became a restriction, which is why he removed it. The truck evolved from a rough diesel swap into a serious engineering platform.
As raced, Old Smokey weighs 4,200 pounds. One of the most important changes in its development was relocating the turbos, water-to-air intercooler, and tank to the rear of the truck. That shift produced a perfect 50/50 weight distribution, dramatically improving the truck's balance. Before that change, the truck had good road holding but intimidating overall handling. With too much weight concentrated up front, hesitation entering a corner would cause severe understeer. Birdsall said the truck demanded total commitment; if the driver entered a corner half-heartedly, the only options were to lift completely and recover or slide off the course.
The rear of the truck now uses a heavily modified subframe built around Steeda components from an S550 Mustang. Power is delivered through an ATS-built automatic transmission with sequential shifting, feeding an RTS 1000 quick-change rear end. Birdsall recently tested the updated truck at Streets of Willow while filming a Top Gear segment and found it vastly more manageable and predictable than the earlier live-axle configuration. In his view, the current version is a much more capable weapon than the one that originally set the diesel record at Pikes Peak.
Birdsall set the Pikes Peak diesel record in Old Smokey with a time of 11:24.065. That result was especially remarkable because the truck entered limp mode from Devil's Playground to the summit, limiting output to roughly 250 horsepower over the final section of the course. That upper portion is where power matters most. The race climbs from about 12,800 feet at Devil's Playground to roughly 14,110 feet at the finish, over more than three miles, with the full 12.42-mile course averaging a 7.2 percent grade. Birdsall believes that without the power reduction, the truck likely had the pace for a mid- to low-10-second run.
He described the moment the truck lost power as obvious even from inside the cab. Crossing the practice start at Devil's Playground, he could hear the engine making substantially less power and knew the run had gone wrong. By the time he reached the summit, he was convinced he had failed to break the record and did not even want to hear the time. Only after officials insisted did he learn that he had still set the record, despite the severe derate. That combination of frustration, uncertainty, and eventual success captured the unique brutality of Pikes Peak, where altitude, grade, and changing conditions punish both driver and machine.
Birdsall first ran Pikes Peak in 2018 and described arriving as a rookie with no real understanding of what the mountain demands. He is uncomfortable with heights, and even driving a rental car up the course before competition made him question why he had committed to the event. Once he began driving with more pace, he gradually desensitized himself to the exposure and convinced himself he could handle it. That confidence came too quickly. During practice, he crashed Old Smokey off Engineer's Corner and into the trees and embankment, suffering significant injuries. He credited his HANS device with saving his life, noting that the impact involved more than 70 g of instantaneous deceleration.
The location of the crash mattered. Because it happened lower on the mountain, trees and terrain absorbed the truck instead of sending it into a bottomless drop beyond the tree line. Birdsall and his shop hand Bobby rebuilt the truck in just eight days and returned for qualifying, only to have the engine begin knocking. Without a spare engine, his 2018 effort ended there.
In 2019, he set the fastest diesel lower-section time, but rain during the race limited competitors to Glen Cove. In 2020, the year he finally secured the diesel record, nearly everything still went wrong. Two engines failed. Another competitor tampered with his truck by flipping switches, which activated his emergency water-spray system and emptied the 11-gallon tank during practice. That left the engine without water injection under full load, causing temperatures to soar to around 270 degrees and shutting the engine down. Later, a brand-new Stage 2 Freedom Racing Engines engine supplied through Dynamite Diesel was hot-soaked after another incident. Birdsall thought the campaign was over again, but after cooling, the engine restarted, showed no blow-by, and ran properly. On race day it overheated and derated, yet still delivered the record. Even then, the truck would not restart for the Parade of Champions because one of the starter mounting bosses had broken during the run, leaving that final launch as the last start the truck had in it.
Birdsall described Garrett as one of his favorite sponsors and said Old Smokey has effectively served as an R&D platform for the company over the last several years. He and Garrett have used the truck to test ideas in the diesel space, especially in high-altitude, high-horsepower compound-turbo applications. The process has been iterative: try a configuration, evaluate it, and revise it if necessary. According to Birdsall, some Garrett product development has been influenced directly by what they learned from Old Smokey.
For Pikes Peak, however, maximum output is not the goal. Birdsall emphasized that a drag-race setup is the wrong approach for the mountain. The truck is intentionally detuned for reliability because Pikes Peak is not a single short pass. It involves repeated practice and qualifying sessions over two weeks, followed by a full race run lasting 10 to 12 minutes under sustained load. That is fundamentally different from a diesel drag truck that only needs to survive for a few seconds. The challenge is not just making power, but making it repeatedly and reliably in thin air.
Banks connected this discussion to his own military and marine turbocharging work, including long-duration NATO durability testing. Birdsall noted that he currently runs a Garrett G45-1500 on Old Smokey, with an 80 mm compressor inducer and what he believed to be a 102 mm turbine exducer. The broader point of the exchange was that sustained pressure ratio and durability matter far more in these applications than peak dyno numbers alone.
For the upcoming Pikes Peak effort, Birdsall is fielding not just Old Smokey but also a diesel-powered LMP car. He explained that an LMP car is a Le Mans Prototype: a flat-bottom, high-downforce race car that is essentially an upside-down wing with four wheels. At around 140 mph, he said, the car should theoretically be capable of driving upside down because of the downforce it generates.
This chassis is based loosely on the Cadillac LMP1 cars that ran at Le Mans in the early 2000s, later reworked by Superlite into a customer platform. Birdsall acquired one of those Superlite LMP1-based cars and chose the VM Motori EcoDiesel V6 as the powerplant. His reasoning was straightforward: the engine is compact, relatively light, and capable of making about 700 horsepower reliably. He had considered a Cummins ISB and the Porsche V6 diesel used in his Cayenne, but the Cummins was too heavy for the application and the Porsche engine lacked aftermarket support. By contrast, the VM Motori platform already had available parts, including CP4 pumps and connecting rods.
Birdsall's engine partners, Freedom Racing Engines and Fleece Performance, built the EcoDiesel with forged rods, a built CP4, and other internal upgrades. For the intake side, they used the Banks cast-aluminum intake manifold to eliminate the restriction of the factory plastic manifold and its butterfly system, which Birdsall did not trust under high boost. Although the engine may be capable of around 700 horsepower, he expects to turn it down to roughly 600 horsepower for Pikes Peak to preserve reliability and maintain headroom for the altitude. He also noted that all quoted power figures are corrected to sea level; at the summit, where air density can be down roughly 35 to 40 percent depending on weather, the turbo system must work extremely hard to recover the loss.
The LMP car uses a full-billet 6XD sequential transmission, a unit Birdsall selected because of its reputation in 3,000-horsepower Pro Mod applications. He wanted a transmission supplier whose core business is transmissions and quick-change systems rather than a side venture. Packaging has already been a challenge. Even with the compact EcoDiesel, the combination of engine, transmission, and quick-change required extending the tail of the car by eight inches, though that also moved the rear wing into cleaner air and improved rear-axle loading.
Banks suggested that hybridization could be the next logical step, especially for torque fill out of the slow corners in the W section of Pikes Peak. Birdsall immediately saw the appeal, noting that electric assist would help the car launch out of those corners where turbo lag and altitude are most punishing. He also recognized the packaging problem: adding a motor-generator behind the engine could make the powertrain too long for the chassis. Banks pointed out that other architectures, such as a motorized axle, could preserve overall length while still delivering hybrid benefits. The discussion reflected a shared view that diesel-electric combinations may offer major advantages in this kind of hillclimb application.
Birdsall plans to have Aaron Kaufman drive Old Smokey at Pikes Peak while he campaigns the new LMP car himself. He chose Kaufman because he wanted someone who would respect the truck, understand the effort invested in it, and still drive it properly. Kaufman already has Pikes Peak experience through his Falcon and Sierra race cars, making him a natural fit. Birdsall's ideal outcome is for Kaufman to break the diesel truck record in Old Smokey, after which Birdsall could return and lower it again himself.
Throughout the conversation, both men emphasized why Pikes Peak remains such a singular challenge. The course is a toll road, not a purpose-built circuit. It can have sunshine at the start and snow at the top. Surface temperatures can vary dramatically from bottom to summit. Decomposed granite can wash across the pavement and create marbles. Marmots, goats, bumps, and abrupt changes in grip all add uncertainty. The lower section is smooth and fast, the middle becomes more technical, and the upper section is rough enough to make a low-suspension race car feel like the wrong tool entirely. Birdsall noted that he still studies the course on a simulator for hours each week and can still get lost mentally on the mountain.
That unpredictability is exactly what attracts him. He described Pikes Peak as requiring a level of focus unlike any other form of racing he has done. There is no room for complacency, and even highly experienced drivers can make mistakes there. For Birdsall, that intensity has made ordinary road racing feel tame by comparison. His goal now is not just to defend a diesel record, but to keep pushing diesel performance forward in one of motorsport's harshest environments.