Normally we’d be starting a new day of Drag Week from the hotel near the racetrack. Such was NOT the case when we started day three of Drag Week 2014. While it had been the norm so far for us to roll in during the wee hours of the morning, we were taking that to a whole new level for day three which was supposed to be our day of racing in Noble, Oklahoma. You’ll recall that when we left off in Part 4 we had only made it to the gas station down the street from the racetrack, because of an alternator belt failure that unfortunately required a very specific cogged belt that we didn’t have a spare for. Larry had basically given up at this point, and because of the pending thunderstorm we decided to head back to the racetrack and get inside the shelter of garage #5, which we knew was still open. After swapping batteries for a freshly charged Optima, we hit the road back to the track. I don’t know why we thought that was going to be easy, since nothing else has been so far. This is what it’s really like to drive a 6 second S10 cross country.

IF YOU MISSED PART 1, CLICK HERE

IF YOU MISSED PART 2, CLICK HERE

IF YOU MISSED PART 3, CLICK HERE

IF YOU MISSED PART 4, CLICK HERE

IF YOU MISSED THE ENGINE BUILD, CLICK HERE

We fire up the truck, turn out the driveway, and make it approximately a quarter mile before I look up and check the water temp on the Fuel Tech touchscreen. All is good. But then Larry looks at his and panic sets in. The driver’s side of the engine is perfectly happy at 180 degrees, but the passenger side, which is reading on the Racepak IQ3 dash, says 210. What the hell is going on here? A few seconds of questioning, and looking for a place to pull over and stop, has us realizing that while we were working on the alternator we unhooked one side of our cooling system inlet system which meant one side of the engine was getting nice cool water and the other side not so much. Crap. Larry decided to just hammer it and get there, so we went from on the throttle to coasting multiple times before pulling in the gate and heading into garage #5. The truck AND trailer wouldn’t fit in the garage and allow us to pull the frontend off, so we left the trailer hanging out in the fresh air that was soon to become fresh rain.

This is where things got real bad, or real good, depending on your perspective. What I forgot to mention was the fact that while the cooling system wasn’t connected correctly and therefore not cooling, we had tightened up the toothless alternator belt while at the gas station and it was now charging like a champ. Go figure.

After pulling the front end off the truck, and standing around talking about options, Larry’s lack of sleep was catching up with him quickly. Thankfully my dad and Scott Clark had stuck with us at the gas station and were with us now in case we decided we needed to head back to Tulsa for the truck and trailer. We unloaded a few things from the trailer, including batteries, chargers, etc., along with several moving blankets we had brought, a comforter we had somehow acquired on the road, and a box of ratchet straps. It was about to get real. Real annoying for both Larson and I that is. Oh, and the girls. Our wives were calling. Not good. First Daphne calls me and is asking what the hell we are going to do. Then she’s telling me what to do, and I’m telling her we are testing stuff and then we’ll let them know. Of course I had told them earlier that I would call and didn’t because we were in such a thrash, so when I got off the phone I had to swear to a call back time. Minutes after getting off the phone with Daphne, Larry’s wife Sherry calls and it’s her and Daphne on speaker phone and they are NOT happy. Daphne knows me, and has seen the stupid crap I’ve come up with, so it takes her about three seconds to tell me to hook the charger to the battery and the charger to the generator in the trailer and get the hell on the road. We of course have already been talking about this idea and are testing to see if it will work when they called. Not the time to explain this FYI. I swear that I’ll call back in 30 minutes and hang up. Larry’s phone rings seconds later. It’s Sherry, and she’s reading him the riot act too. Thank god the girls were on us. We wouldn’t have made it otherwise.

After finding a random piece of 2×12 sitting in garage #5, and deciding it was perfect for us, we laid it across the back of the chassis on the truck above the battery, sat the generator on it, and got our ratchet strap on. Done and done. At this point Larry hits the wall. I tell him to go get in the passenger seat of my dad’s truck and get some sleep. Dad moves the truck into garage #4, and the rain starts for real. While Larry is sleeping, and dad is about to pass out in a folding chair, Clark and I start testing how much load all the stuff on the truck takes with regards to electricity. Our Optima 1200 Charger will do 15 amps, and we aren’t much above that for the Meziere water pump, electric fans, headlights and Aeromotive fuel pumps. The MSD Ignition, Fuel Tech EFI, and ancillary stuff add up as well, but Scott and I figure that the battery will last an hour or so before we have to switch it out for a fresh one if we keep the generator and charger rolling. Everything is set. This is our plan. We plug the battery chargers into the wall, and decide we need to get an hour’s sleep. There are three reasons we wanted to wait an hour, one is that the extra time to charge batteries was a good thing, the hour of sleep was extra time to charge us, and it was raining like a mother outside so we preferred driving our wiperless pickup without rain. I called the girls as promised, after Scott and I laid out a few moving blankets to get some sleep on, and told them we were waking up in an hour and 15 minutes, pack up and hit the road, and that we would call them then. It was 2:10 am.

At 3:20 am Sherry called and I had just woke up from my first alarm. I told her to give us a little bit and we’d call to fill them in. We packed up the last of our stuff, checked batteries, fired up the generator, and made our second attempt at getting out of town. Back to the gas station we go, and we’ve got no time to spare. On the way to the gas station I remember that we are supposed to call the Discovery Channel TV folks and tell them we are leaving. Ooops. I call, tell them we are hitting the gas station and then the road, and they tell us they’ll catch up in a little while. I just hope we make it far enough to require being caught up to. It’s raining, but not too hard, we get gas and are on the road with one eye on the voltage, one on the temp, and the other two trying to sleep. Woot woot, we’re going to make it baby!

Larry is driving for the first little bit, and not too far down the road we turn the wrong direction, have to backup down the onramp, have to pull over to fix headlights that don’t want to keep working, and ultimately get back to cruising down the road right about the time it stops raining. An hour or so down the expressway, we pull into one of the oasis gas stations and grab snacks and drinks. Larry, despite having two hours of sleep to my one, doesn’t look like he has closed his eyes at all. I tell him I’m driving and we hit the road. He’s worried I’ll fall asleep, and is doing everything he can to stay awake. It’s not working, but he keeps waking up and asking if I’m okay. I tell him that as soon as the sun comes up we are in the clear, and finally it starts to lighten the eastern sky. Because we are both sleep deprived and/or driving and navigating both, we miss a turn or two and have to go down the road and turn around. Luckily we realized we were missing them at the time we were supposed to turn, rather than driving for miles and miles before turning around.

We’d exhausted every option we could think of at midnight the night before looking for an alternator belt, with no luck, and after leaving the Oasis we lost the alternator belt for good and were running on battery power only. Coming into some small town, the voltage started dropping quick and I pulled across an intersection and into a gas station with only 8.8 volts reading on the gauge. The truck was still running, but getting warm because of the lack of voltage to the water pump and electric fans. A battery swap, and calls to some local racers had us back on the road, but with no luck in finding a new belt.

Larry was driving again, and I decided it was time to use the power of social media. I posted up details on our need for a belt on Facebook and told people that they should text me. I explained that you can’t hear a damn thing while riding in the truck and that I needed to text or there would be no effective communication. The response was awesome. And disappointing. Awesome because a ton of people hit me up and tried to help. Disappointing because about a third of the people called me rather than texting. I love you guys.

Larry wasn’t in the mood when I started shooting selfies. LOL

The rest of our journey to Noble was like Groundhog day. Despite stopping and trying other belts, including serpentine and v-belts just for kicks, we could not keep our Powermaster alternator running. And so our trip consisted of installing a freshly charged Optima battery that was getting charged by our generator and Optima 400 charger, and leaving the 1200 charger connected to the main battery while we drove. Swapping out batteries became a 5 minute job, which is good because we ended up having to do it more and more frequently. When we started out each battery would last 50 miles. By the time we would roll into Noble, we were lucky to make it 12 miles before needing to swap batteries again.

And as if all our other drama wasn’t enough, we almost got killed during one of the checkpoints. Full lockup on all the brakes in the gravel parking lot as some dumb broad came sliding around the backside of the auto parts store. Another great Hot Rod directions moment. One way alley boys and girls. And you sent us the wrong way. Don’t worry, we’re used to it. Nothing proves you are driving a street car like crappy roads, and dirt parking lots. Woot woot!

The Optima batteries actually did a great job, but with no where near enough charging time they never truly got a full charge after using our initial 3 good batteries. It sucked. And with 75 miles to go, the excitement of getting close was being squashed by the realization that we had to travel that 75 miles in about 85 minutes, if we were going to have one hour to get the truck ready and make a run in Noble. The closer we got the less likely it seemed. David Kennedy, Hot Rod Editor in Chief, was texting to find out where we were, and so were the girls. When we started getting close, like 20 miles out, we started to get a renewed energy, and were hoping we could actually get the truck ready in time to make a pass.

Daphne had already scoped us out a pit spot, and said there were some of our buddies ready and waiting for us to get there so we could get the truck ready in time. When we rolled in, the entire place lost it’s mind.

As we turned the corner into the pit area, Daphne was waiving and then started running. She guided us through the pits and into a spot on nice level concrete. When we came to a stop, the crowd was insane. I’m talking 10 people deep all the way around our pit, and before we even stopped our buddies all came out of the woodwork. And with rare exception they were all originals. As in original 2005 Drag Week participants that we had been with since the beginning. I know I can’t touch on all of them, but I know that Bill Fowler, Paul Whalen, Dustin Haase, Scott Clark, and Fuel Tech’s Rafa were all on hand getting it on. Carl Scott, winner of the 1st Drag Week, even showed up with the alternator belt we needed. As I climbed out of the truck and got the trailer unhooked, guys were taking instruction from my dad, Walt, and were unloading the entire trailer. They didn’t know what we needed, but they knew that if it was all out of the trailer it was better than having to dig inside it. In 29 minutes we turned the truck around from street to race trim, which was unbelievable. Todd Martin, from Tulsa Raceway Park, even helped pack the chutes when one fell out before pulling into the lanes.

With Lonnie counting down the minutes, we fired the truck and got it over to the staging lanes with only 30 seconds to spare. We had 5 minutes to make our run. We got Larry in the truck and tried to catch our breath. I couldn’t hardly control myself after seeing all those people circle around and cheer us on. And for all those guys to help was amazing. This is what Drag Week is all about, and I was truly overcome as I put Larry in the truck. We didn’t have time to put the wheelie bar on the truck, which didn’t worry me much considering our original goal for the truck has always been to run in the 5’s without a wheelie bar. Everyone else was concerned, but I pulled Larry into the water, gave him the go sign, and he did a nice burnout. When he backed up from the burnout I held him up, looked under the truck for any leaks, and gave him the thumbs up. Anyone watching the live broadcast would see me standing behind the truck with my hands on my head, as I was so exhausted and overwhelmed I didn’t know what to think. Larry revved up the truck, building boost, as the lights came down. Once the boost was up Larry let go of the trans brake button and the truck lurched forward and then slowed. I saw the rear wheels “ratchet” when the truck left, and then coasted to a stop. Something broke. And we had no time for another run. Larry slowly cruised down the track to a 43 second pass. This was the worst thing we could have experienced. It either broke a transmission, GearVendors, or the rearend. I had no question in my mind that the rear was fine, but the transmission and GearVendors were another thing.

The mood had just went from a high that nobody had every seen on Drag Week to a low that I had never felt. I couldn’t even talk to anyone. I walked off on my own to cry like a man. Alone.

A few minutes later Larry pulled up to the pit and we started talking about our problem. Ultimately our testing, along with help from Rick Johnson at GearVendors, determined that the GearVendors rolled a sprag. It’s not the GearVendors fault ultimately, as we had shortened up the wheelbase causing an unknown bind in the driveshaft. Remember the vibration from yesterday? Yeah, that was the start.

Until that run, which counts as 20 seconds by Hot Rod’s Drag Week Rules, we were in the hunt for a 6th overall Drag Week win. Not anymore.

After putting in a new GearVendors, modified so that we didn’t have further problems, and moving the rear axle back a little bit, we were loaded up and back on the road just before dark. I rode with my dad to the first checkpoint so I could record some VO for Optima’s Search for the Ultimate Street Car tv show that I host, while Rafa rode with Larry. At the checkpoint, while uploading my VO and waiting for Larry, both dad and I fell asleep in his truck and were awakened by Larry knocking on the window. Never heard the truck pull up.

I drove from there, on what may be the scariest Drag Week road trip ever. Falling asleep while driving is bad, and we did it a lot, despite trading off driving duties and sleeping in the truck. The road from Noble to Great Bend was also probably one of the most dangerous in Drag Week history. The Hot Rod city folk had no clue about driving through the country this time of year as the full moon and weather meant the deer were moving  A LOT in search of food. When we slid the truck, and trailer, to a stop in order to miss Bambi it was the wake up we needed for sure. This is what it’s like to drive a 6 second S10 cross country.

It would be another late night for us, but we got to Great Bend around 4:30 am which meant we got two hours of sleep rather than 1. At this rate we might get some real sleep by the last day! I’m not betting on it. Are you?