06/12/2025
We did it!!! 4th place in Unlimited with a 6000 lb truck in the biggest drag and drive in the world!!!! Rocky Mountain Race Week Mega Week 💪 💪
It was a crazy year with tons of breakage and fixing but we fixed everything we had to and the truck is overall in much better shape than when we started the week!
The timing was crazy off to start the week in Tulsa, but we got it running good enough to make some passes and drive it thanks to tuning wizards Brent Coddington and Chad Fegley giving me guidance and a helping hand.
We made it to Flying H and made one pass where the puke tank for the transmission overflowed on to the headers causing a smoke show but luckily no fire, but I still jumped out of the truck with a fire extinguisher just in case. Then about ten miles after leaving the track, the front seal on the transmission popped out, causing another smoke show but on the interstate in traffic 😶🌫️ we got it pulled over to the side and there was a slight fire but Damon got it out immediately with the fire extinguisher 🧯
After we got pulled off the interstate into a Love's truck stop, we contacted Bobby Burr with the mobile lift and he came to us right away to get the truck on the lift and Aaron Ginn of Bubba Ginn Transmission came to help us figure out if the transmission was toast, but it was fine besides the front seal popping out due to me not venting the trans properly. We put a new seal in and got the trans installed again, filled with fluid, and got back on the route to our hotel.
The next day was a very wet drive day to Thunder Valley in OKC, but that was the easiest day this week 😅 we stopped at Mel Hambilton Ford in Wichita for our one checkpoint and they have a pretty sweet selection of go fast parts and a very knowledgeable staff. We got a new catch can for the transmission and a phase-able rotor for the distributor, which again with Brents help, totally fixed our ignition issue! I had no idea that the phase-able rotor was basically a necessity for an EFI with a distributor
Thunder Valley went awesome after we changed plugs and fixed the timing with Brent! We ran an 11.29 and an 11.4 with the timing pretty conservative, then headed out to Texas
Texas Motorplex was much less hot than last year and we ran an 11.4 again since I accidentally shifted from 1st to 3rd, but the timing I added back definitely was making it faster.
The drive back to Tulsa was very long and warm, which had us pulling over to cool down the truck quite often, and two hours into our trip, the truck wouldn't start back up after dying on a bridge, causing a backup of traffic. We got pulled to a safe place off the bridge where there was an amazing steakhouse, got steak dinner, and the truck fired up fine after dinner. But when we only had about 45 minutes left to go, we stopped for fuel and the starter refused to engage properly so we pushed it next door to a hotel for the night.
After we woke up, we figured out that the starter was falling apart, got it halfway fixed enough to start the truck once, and made it to the track to break the beams, finishing the week, without turning it off or the truck dying 💪
After we got to the track, we tore the starter apart again and headed to a hardware store to find the metric cap screws that we needed to fix it, got it fixed but the Bendix doesn't retract fully so it needs messed with every time the starter is ran 🙃
Tomorrow we'll put some E85 in it for the first time and see what it does with a bit more boost and corn juice during the shootout! 💪
Huge thank you to my wife Tori Patton for putting up with me getting ready for this every year, and now watching our son by herself for a week, my dad Chris Patton and Duane Dinkel for following along the whole week in case we needed emergency help, and my family and friends for all the support they give!
