06/29/2026
To make a long story short, we didn't take home the W yesterday, but we should've, and after you read this, you'll see that we already won getting this far.
First off thank you to Jesse Wilson for being my pit crew member for the weekend. We made a ton of progress and put ourselves in a position to win.
Brandon Smith, Joel Knauber and I have been busting our butts to get a transmission brake working in the truck for the last few weeks and ultimately fell short despite removing and reinstalling it 8 times! Tuesday night last week I bought a used 4l85e transmission for $147 (plus core) from a 345,000 mile van in a last ditch effort to just be able to race this weekend. By midnight on Tuesday Brandon and I had the transmission fully torn apart, intermediate steels replaced, valve body swap, pump booster installed and nearly ready for install. Wednesday night we got it installed and driven on the street. I spent the remaining time buttoning up a bunch of stuff on the truck to get it ready to go. Big thanks to my wife Gabriella for putting up with all the late nights in the shop.
Fridays test and tune overall went well and we learned a lot. I very much expected to make one pass, have a transmission failure and load back up but nope, we made 9 passes on the day with that junkyard transmission which was awesome. We found a wastegate spring combo that got us in the middle of the range of boost control duty cycle in the 11 second Pass range and a decent understanding of how much duty cycle to adjust to go faster or slower by a small margin.
Saturday was the day of the race. We made our qualifying pass at an 10.86 which put us in the 11.0 class which is right where we wanted to be. After the drivers meeting we embarked on the 28 mile cruise which was no issue for the truck at all. When we arrived we immediately lined up to make our first race pass which was slower than we would've liked but in the ballpark. We turned up the boost for our second run and this is where we ultimately lost the race. While staging I turned on the first staging bulb and got on the two step, then using the footbrake I tried to bump forward into the second beam but upset the chassis, locked up the front tires and slid past, red lighting. Of course this wouldn't have happened with a transmission brake.
Because of this they slapped us with a 28 second penalty for that run which took us out of contention. The average of our first and third pass would've won the class by a good margin and we could've made up even more with a proper second Pass.
Glass half full, at the beginning of last week I thought there was very little chance we'd be at this race, let alone in a position to win our class. We had a blast, and learned a lot. We will be back next year. Thanks to Rock Falls Raceway and Torqstorm Superchargers for putting on the event and class!
