Diesel Battle | Pikes Peak 2022
it might be the right formula."
from sun up to sundown, and even through the night, it was crazy crazy, like 20 hour days non-stop the whole week"
Andersen: That's how you prepare for Pike's Peak, and seeing other very big teams go through the exact same struggles that we've gone through, It's just kind of the nature of the Beast."
ike welcome to LYFE, this is what we're doing!"
to compare the times and kind of see how things are going, and Cole was really fast!"
know, one of the most difficult sections of race surface in the world, the upper section of Pikes Peak!"
the bottom"
Andersen: "We are now ready to go take our chance at the mountain, to see if we can beat a diesel record, to see if we can beat our other buddies and their diesel-powered vehicles. If we're going to have a car that even makes it to the top of the mountain?"
Tech Day
moment to sit in the truck and drive or you flew there and you've had a little bit of time to yourself to kind of catch up on what's just kind of happened in the past few weeks, it's all a bit of a blur"
came around it and just were going over it."
a pretty magical feeling especially with with a monster like this."
here."
Powelson: "We need to make a vote here, on whether we run nitrous or not.
Andersen: Cole makes a last minute decision to make a class change because I think we were really concerned about the use of nitrous or not"
Powelson: "If we use nitrous it moves us into unlimited which is going to put
know whether we're the first car or the 17th car we're going to be in the first group, which is historically more We have concerns about how the turbos are going to behave a high altitude being off nitrous. We're kind of split right now, Clay is saying
o we're gonna call and get a Charlie vote and that'll kind of decide which way we go"
weren't planning on using nitrous if we were going for the diesel record but I think it became apparent very quickly that we needed nitrous to help get the car to move out of corners."
Powelson: "You know it's ultimately Clay's decision and Charlie didn't overrule it, so I think we're gonna move to unlimited and stay on the bottle. We're definitely going to be able to make more power at elevation, we'll know tomorrow morning on the upper section."
DAY 2 Upper Section
Powelson: "We're at Devil's Playground right now about 13,000 feet about to crack something out for the very first time 6.0 excited about it
Brewer: "I wasn't
he very first time I get to really drive the car outside of a parking lot was on I don't know one of the most difficult sections of race surface in the world the upper section of Pikes Peak"
any confidence in the car if anything I lost confidence.
Powelson: "When I came to the stop I heard boiling, and the hood started to bubble and it was not good."
the brake pedal feel again as a brand new braking system the car is very heavy we wanted to make sure that everything
try to get to a race track so that we could do some actual Shakedown prior to qualifying
Powelson: "The great Folks at PPIR were
the team did a killer job of getting the car up to speed get us onto PPIR and I was able to turn some laps around a
happy with the changes we had made and he was ready for qualifying"
DAY 3 Qualifying
better chance you have a better weather earlier in the morning, so we knew we wanted to qualify well and get a bunch of runs in."
his is a really fast technical section of the run so it's kind of a good scale to kind of see how things are going to go".
Andersen : "He's very fast, very very fast. We were really excited about the
it never shows up.."
was kind of a big blow to the team because that meant we were going to be forced to run at the back of the pack."
time to go sort out as much as we possibly can in
the issues that we were aware of."
Lome: "Everybody was addressing separate issues, we all got tons of stuff done,
of those issues as well."
Lone: "T
made a big mistake, these fellows let me work on the car I did not do a good job"
about midnight, we start to put things back together, we're getting ready to load it up in the trailer so we can go sleep for maybe two hours.
Andersen: "We go to fire it up, to drive into the trailer and that's when we realized that this week was not going to be an easy week.."
Day 4
to make it because the car won't start.
Andersen: "We pull the oil pan.."
Lone: "I know
pan that the engine was done Hermansen: "There was just metal everywhere, we knew we had a catastrophic failure we need to address that immediately"
o we knew at that point that we had a lot of work to do."
Brewer: "We couldn't get Frank to turn over off of the starter, so we were chasing ground leads and trying to make sure everything electrical wise was okay, to no avail. The starter would only kick the engine over like one degree at a time so we found the biggest range we had put it on the crank snout put I think it was a jack handle on top of that"
that I definitely bruised my butt yanking on that uh pry bar"
originally thought it was electrical issue because the starter wouldn't turn, well the starter wouldn't turn because the electronics said we can't turn a starter that's attached to a seized engine.
key is finding the source of the failure so you just don't have the same failure on the new engine we don't want to waste
can replace the engine we can replace the pump um but what what's the real issue here. We still don't know yet so locked up a pair of purple rods is a big indicator that those rods were not getting fed sufficient oil doesn't matter how good your oil is if the oil doesn't get there
guys from Riffraff Diesel were there to help throw everything together, if it wasn't for them we couldn't have done what we did.
Powelson: "We had Peter, Clay and Nick, they were the
special to see, we had our end handled they just need to handle the motor now."
guys that weren't as exhausted as we were. They had some energy and were ready to go in and like take stuff off, and we're like please like have at it man!"
Andersen: "We're hoping that this engine rebuild is going to take four or five hours, it ended up taking quite a bit longer than that"
Lone: "Just trying to source all the pieces that we didn't have it's just the smallest stuff that you run into, like oh yeah we got an engine we got all the parts that we need oh well the head gaskets aren't right, we're trying to find head gaskets at like 10 pm. And like the dowels that align the heads are the wrong size, well let's
time each day kind of blended together to where if you tried to ask me what happened on Thursday versus Friday or Saturday. It would be really hard to kind of tell when that happened because essentially it felt like Thursday to Saturday was one day."
Day 5
on it."
the first thing is we're dealing with a drag racer right so drag races are always flat, we're going up the hill so when we go up a hill all of our oils back here we're starving these scavengers so the other thing is we're pulling up in the back of the heads and so he's saying put a stash 16 at the back of the pan cap one of these off and if we could take another scaffold from the valve covers because the heads are filling up g-forces and uphill the entire time so
the demands finally get to the point.
valve covers to put on.
Andersen: "The conversation went if the billet valve covers go on the engine they're not going to come off, they physically won't come off without us pulling the engine.
take the valve covers off of a new engine build.
Andersen: "The answer was if we have to pull the valve covers there's
decent amount of work mostly just because everything's so big and heavy."
but it's not going to change we're not going to not go to Pikes Peak we're not going to not show up for race day."
Andersen: "We're changing an engine in a car we're diagnosing all these issues all with the potential that we won't even have a chance to drive because of the weather on Sunday"
Powelson: "As you're getting sleep deprived and tired and thinking crazy thoughts and your mind's playing tricks on you if you look at that weather we don't need to finish this because nobody's going to have a shot to run the mountain because it was the worst it couldn't have been any worse I can't control the weather what I can control is getting the car to the start line"
the cars put back together we're ready to start it and again we're ready to load it in the trailer and go get some sleep and at two o'clock in the morning I'll never forget the sound of
slept so we're all tired and we haven't we haven't done any testing with the car crank it"
the first thing we do after we install the engine is have to pull these valve covers off"
exhausted we needed to get some sleep it wasn't going to be anything that we were able to to fix immediately it was going to take quite a bit of undoing of this engine install to get to where these valve covers would come out
figure out what the solution is."
at 5:00 AM, he's like 'I think I'm gonna quit tomorrow' I'm like you're just gonna leave? He's like quit LYFE
way but if I was just to I'm tired I want to quit rage quit, would I still be able to catch a ride back home or would I have to get a flight home?
Lone: "Like dude, why would you come so far not see the end. So I told him Cole's motivational words that he told me when we were doing the Subaru. He's like you just you gotta fight the good fight to the end brother."
Day 6
we're gonna see what we can do to pull these valve covers.
The strut towers that are in the engine bay are so close to the engine that you physically could not remove the valve covers. We have this massive powertrain that we're trying to wedge into this GTR if the engine was a quarter inch wider it would not fit in the car at all. We would have to chop the whole front end to get it to fit if it was a quarter inch wider that's how tight it was. We figured it would be worth a risk or we would take the chance to try to see if we can just kind of shimmy the engine and transmission side to side to allow us to remove these valve covers.
a valve cover off to undo all the rockers and swap out push rods. Clay's team was super stoked to get it one last chance, like at least we can do this!"
RACE DAY
our live stream presented by Mobile 1
Andersen: "We are now ready to go take our chance at the mountain to see if we can beat a diesel record to see if we can beat our other buddies in their diesel-powered vehicles, if we're going to have a car that even
Powelson: "Here we are at the start line of 100th running the Pikes Peak Hill Climb as you can see it's foggy it's rainy it's terrible conditions but they're still sending competitors all the way to the summit.
Lone: "It was so gnarly you couldn't you couldn't see 30 feet in front of you at the bottom
Powelson: "Initially, on race day it shows 80 percent chance of rain, what the weather didn't show was 100 chance of fog, it was everywhere from the start line to the Finish Line the whole course is covered in fog. It's damp then it starts to rain then the fog gets worse and then it lightens up a little bit in the middle. It just was a miserable day weather-wise for every competitor that attacked the mountain.
go through and double check everything!"
Hermansen: "Low and behold, us not getting a qualified time helped us
bottom but the reports are saying that once you leave the bottom, let's say quarter of the mountain the roads all dry up. So we sent him off on the Slicks, Ready to make a good pass."
If you don't know this gentleman, (Cole Powelson) he runs Time Attack, he's raced here before in the SIERRA ALPHA. This will put an exclamation point on the 100th running of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Cole Powelson, that's diesel! That's right the current record is 11:24!"
Hermansen: "I was just tripping, like what happened, like did he crash? Did
so I think Cole is the concern"
Brewer: "Jared Dienda is announcing and he's like oh man safety's going up! There's only two cars on track, someone must have went off or there's an accident."
Andersen: "Instantly we're just kind of deflated as a team, but we're still watching the live stream"
all sudden here comes Cole through the fog!
Announcer: Yep that is Cole!"
Brewer: "E
diesel-powered vehicle"
Poweslon: "I start to find a rhythm, start to remember parts of the course as the fog's breaking up, and then I break into the sunlight and it's clear and it's beautiful and the car feels great, and I'm feeling it, I'm ready to rip!"
Andersen: "In the back of our minds we're thinking, Cinderella Story. We've had the worst week, all week Cinderella Story."
off, it did exactly what it did on quality day. I could not believe it!"
that's gonna be all she wrote for Cole, It's really unfortunate, kind of the unique build.
Powelson: "I wish it didn't feel so good before it felt so bad".
Powelson: "The potential for the diesel record was right there!, it was in my hands."
Safety: What happened!?"
Powelson: We put a Powerstroke into a Nissan GT-R and it didn't work" [LAUGHTER]
Powelson: "Ultimately it's just an undeveloped car, It doesn't have all
but there's always next year and we've built
sleep at night and think of, it is in our vision it's right in front of us! I know this car can do it, that's no longer a question. It's how much deeper past 11:00 can we go?
Andersen: "To put so much blood sweat and tears- and sleepless nights into a
this point I'm very anxious for the future and I'm very anxious for the rest of the world to see what this monster can do."
Poweslon: "What we were able to overcome in preparation for race day to give that just one shot at the mountain was truly a magical experience to be a part of,
wanted nobody did, due to weather and fog and everything else. But it was the greatest team effort I've ever been a part of and it was a really cool thing to witness first hand."
