(Photos by Brad Klaassen) – You’ve heard the cat calls because we sure have. People yelling from on high that there’s no innovation left in drag racing and that the sport is become a stagnant pool of the same stuff. Those are people looking at “drag racing” through the narrowest of terms and they are looking at the same sets of classes that have been contested for 30 years straight, resulting in equipment that is refined and designed to do a specific job very well. If you are shocked that no one is showing up to run Super Comp in a dragster powered by a twin turbo Coyote engine and that virtually every car has a 555+ci big block Chevy engine in it, you obviously don’t understand what it means to have the right tool for the job. That being said, there are plenty of places, classes, and venues that continue to thrive on the creativity and brains of their competitors, especially those guys who don’t want to walk in lock step with everyone else. Top dragster is one of those places. As long as it does not have doors and you keep yourself from running any quicker than 6.00 in the quarter mile, you can do virtually whatever the hell you want in Top Dragster and that’s what Texas John Robison plans to do and has been doing with his Cummins diesel powered altered.

Bad Brad Klaassen has run into this car several times at various race tracks and he sent us a bunch of photos featuring the car earlier in the season running at North Star Dragway in Texas and more recently with a red paint job running at Tulsa Raceway Park. Brad reports that the team is still working on getting the car off the starting line consistently but it is obvious that it is making incredible amounts of power form the new and highly modified Cummins engine they are using. In fact, Robison has already set and achieved a few personal goals with the car this year in the form of racing the machine at the NHRA Divisional at the Texas Motorplex earlier this year and breaking the 200mph mark, qualifying for the Top Dragster field, and running the car down in the six second zone. This is heavy duty stuff and it makes Robison’s car one of the quickest diesels on the planet. Yes, not THE quickest but one of the quickest and herein lines the rub. Robison wants to get his car up to the NHRA National event in Norwalk, Ohio (July 3-5) and he wants to run top dragster. This in and of itself is tough sledding as that race will have one of the quicker fields in the nation trying to qualify. The second thing which would actually kick this whole deal straight into the stratospherically epic level is that Dan Scheid, who is the owner and tuner of the world’s quickest (6.35 quarter) and (we think) fastest (221 terminal speed) diesel dragster will also be there trying to get into the same field. It would be one of the biggest deals in the history of diesels in the sport of drag racing if both of those guys showed up and actually made the field. If they ever actually raced each other, it would be titanic although Scheid has the marked performance advantage at this point, the thought of two diesel powered cars running in top dragster against each other is something that would have been taken as utter comedy even just 10 years ago.

Here’s what John Robison had to say about the team’s progress on his own blog after the Texas divisional in late April:

What a weekend! We were in Ennis, Texas, at the NHRA Divisional, running side by side with blown alcohol dragsters. Years ago when we pulled up to an NHRA event with a diesel, we would take some friendly ribbing from the big boys with comments like, “Yea they run pretty fast but they can’t cut a light.” This weekend changed everything. We cut a .000 .003 .006 & a .033. Now we can race anywhere with those reaction times! But I did wind up red lighting in the first round 🙂

Our goals for this weekend were: Get my top dragster driver’s license … check. Get a diesel through a stringent NHRA tech inspection … check. Get the car into the six’s … check. Get the car over 200 mph … check. Actually get the car qualified in top dragster competition … check! The exciting thing is there’s plenty of Power Service horsepower still left in this motor … a ton of power! We’re looking into a trip to Norwalk, Ohio, for the NHRA
National event and get side by side with the Scheid dragster. It would be an epic event for diesel motorsports to have two of these diesel monsters running together in a sold-out event.

Next race is the TS Outlaw in Bowling Green, KY … and we are ready! See ya soon, John.