Well this was a bad day at the pulling office! Check out what happens to this Oliver Tractor when the driver hooks to the sled and bounces his way down the course. The thing literally breaks in half. What guys who don’t know lots about tractors tend to forget is the fact that a machine like this does not have a frame per se. Instead it has what’s known as a “component chassis” in the fact that the engine, transmission, and rear axle ARE the frame for the machine. This is the reason that we have seen these videos in the past when a clutch explodes or something, it’ll bust the sucker in two. Here, it seems like the violence of the bouncing action is what causes the thing to fail and disassemble itself.
A perfect pull looks almost like a boat planing along the water. You’ll see a tractor build boost, come off the line, and gracefully hover the front end just off the ground. This gives 100% weight transfer to the rear tires that are driving the machine and if the nose is nice and level the driver has a great opportunity to make the proper throttle and braking adjustments to keep the pull going all the way out the back door. This is not that.
Here’s you’ll see a very heavy tractor bouncing itself off the ground a bunch, loading and unloading the rear tires every time it happens. A few of the bounces are pretty bad. If you were to do this in a multi-engine “unlimited” style tractor we’d bet you dollars to donuts that the front end would be broken out of it. Not this guy. The front end on this Oliver is beefy and instead of it being the fusible link it seems like the bolts holding the axle/transmission to the back of the block got it the worst.
There’s nothing good about having your stuff towed off in any motorsports but having it removed in two piece? Yeah, that’s bad.
