Diesel Warz Drag by Diesel World

More than 60 trucks showed up to do battle on the well-prepped 1/8-mile, family-owned drag strip situated about 60 miles east of Nashville and about 120 west of Knoxville. According to track numbers, more than 3,200 spectators were there to watch three drag racing classes: Heads Up 4,500-pound minimum, 7.70 Index and Sportsman ET Bracket. And for those who didn’t want to race, there was also a show-n-shine contest.

One of the cool things about the first-time event was that it had modest entry fees of $40 for racers and $10 each for show-n-shiners and spectators, making it a hot August night of fun that was affordable to all in the vicinity. Promoters put up $4,000 in purse money for the top finishers in the three drag racing classes with trophies on the line for show-n-shine winners.

The afternoon featured a lot of bench racing in the pits while crew members and drivers socialized and chatted about their rides or worked on those critical finishing touches before running down the track. Spectators who arrived early were able to wander through the pits to get close-up views of many of the competition trucks.

First place in the show and shine competition went to Stephanee Wright for her lifted black ’03 Ford F-250, which was also recently featured in Diesel World Magazine’s Girls Gone Diesel section. Second place went to the clean red ’02 Dodge 2500 owned by Buck Taylor. The third place award rounded out the big three manufacturers with Doug Crocker’s white ’05 Chevrolet 2500 HD filling out the podium.
Drivers were able to run two time-trial passes to get used to the track conditions and set their dial-ins before the action and eliminations started. Shawn Proctor had the quickest and fastest pass of the event turning in a 5.98 second pass at 122.94 mph in the Black’s Diesel ’06 Cummins common rail-powered 2WD Dodge 1500. Fast times and good side-by-side racing were seen in the bracket classes as well as the 7.70 Index class. The first passes of the day were run at about 5:30 and the last pass of the day crossed the line around 10:30, finishing up the night of racing in time for most racers to get home before midnight.
The majority of the racers at the event were competing in the Sportsman Bracket class where literally any diesel vehicle could compete. Speaking of which, this event happened to take place while we had a new Chevy Cruze Turbo Diesel road test car. For the review take a peek at Diesel World’s December 2013 issue for the full story. Not resisting a chance to flog someone else’s vehicle under the guise of legitimate testing, we ran the Cruze in the Bracket class. Our best pass was 10.77 seconds at 63.54 mph. Not surprising, we were eliminated in the first round.