18 Seconds of Sheer Kinetic Oblivion

By Scott Beckwith

The powershift. It’s everything when you’re drag racing a four speed, and it’s exponential when you’re drag racing a semi truck with 18 gears. A gigantic diesel engine has a narrow power band, and it takes lots of gears to keep the truck and a potential 30 ton load hauling up hills and down the road… or, in this case, just the tractor of the tractor trailer combo violently lunging toward 80 miles per hour in just a quarter mile from a dead stop. Yeah, Dexter - your daddy’s Camry can do that, I know. But your daddy’s Camry doesn’t weigh 19,000 pounds and have enough torque to reverse the earth’s rotation.

Most guys can think of one scene or another and think, “That was the greatest 18 seconds of my life.” Not many drag racers look at an 18 second pass and think that. Your average fairly peppy car that drives to the track will run 15 seconds, give or take. A prepped machine, something with a power-to-weight-ratio monkeyed with by engine mods and weight reduction, 12s and 13s are hauling ass. A 10 second quarter and you’re up around a hundred and twenty through the lights. Hell I saw a Tesla - a leased, company car - drive in on a “Test and tune” night and click off a 9-something at 155 miles an hour. That’s faster than most of the racing cars that shake the hallowed ground here at this little rural Texas track, filling the air with the smells of heated tires and burned racing gas.

But I’ll tell you this, friend - there is not a whole lot more action you can have in 18 seconds than to be in the cab with a trucker determined to run the absolute apeshit out of a huge machine he drives every day and even lives in for weeks at a time, hauling everything to everywhere, cross country and back. This right here is where they come to blow off steam and play with THEIR hot rods, that THEY built and customized, THEIR Tonka toys, now bigger than life. You’ve never seen more bouncing around, more shifting gears, more unholy internal combustion noise, than the launching of two of these behemoths off the starting line. Pictures from inside are pointless - you’re thrown back in the seat with every shift, and there’s one about every half second to find traction and get rolling. Deputized as an official track photographer, I played that into a ride-along for two runs with Roadblock and his ‘99 Peterbilt. Actually, a Roadblockbilt, as he pulled it out of a junkyard and fixed the wreck into a driver. What’s more hot rod than that?

A powershift is when you slam into the next gear without lifting off the gas - in this case, I don’t even think he touched the clutch pedal. SLAM! Lurch over and forward, whine of a turbocharger the size of your face at full spool and the all of an engine that weighs as much as your car; WHAM!. That was a half second. Again. Again. Aaaagain. Aaaaagain… all the way down the track. Grinding a gear or missing a shift happens in a 4 or 5 speed car; it happens a lot in a truck. I mean how in the name of all that’s holy do you even remember the shift pattern? OK, you skip a gear here and there. How? Where? Finger button up or down? Roadblock was throwing that stick every which way, he even slammed his hand into the dash on a particularly violent shove into… I don’t know, 8th gear? 10th? I just don’t know. There was a LOT going on.

The racing was the afternoon main event of the morning’s truck show. It was a beautiful deep southern November Saturday, and this day was all about trucks.

I’ve been into trucks since before I was even into cars. It was the Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey & The Bandit that turned me car crazy, along with influence from both father AND stepdad, the neighbor kids with the rock band, and everybody else running raggedy 10 year old muscle cars all jacked up with wide tires and slot mags. But truckers were KING SHIT in the 70s, trucker culture was everywhere, BJ and The Bear was on TV, and those striped big rigs really grabbed me as a kid. I’ll tell you what - if there’s a 10 year old boy anywhere inside of you, you get around this many semi trucks up close and you absolutely lose your shit. And the real kids, they love trucks! They want to hear the horns. They want to get up in them. I saw a tiny little version of a trucker, complete with little Stetson hat and mini silver rodeo buckle, polishing the chrome on his model of his daddy’s truck. This was the truck show, right? So he puts it over on the chrome step of the big truck and just beams with pride. What puffed that kid up in that moment is what all the big-scale polishing and armor-alling is about. Pride. Pride in these machines, pride in who these men are and what they do, pride in the country that they serve - who may not understand or appreciate them, but absolutely depends on them, and every trucker understands that. These trucks are American A F. Truck RACING is American A. F.

“Put your back against the seat,” he told me. Good God. First run was high into 18 seconds, a hard launch with some wheelspin and a couple of grindy shifts. Pulling back around past the grass lot full of other trucks and spectator pickups, through the show lane again up to the starting line, we talked briefly about the life and how many just don’t get it. Truckers in general are feeling a bit beat up these days; it felt great to be able to tell this guy “More than not appreciate you, what you do, and are grateful. Way more than not.” The next run, hey, listen - I’m not blowing smoke and I swing from nobody’s nuts - but this guy cut a near perfect light, launched this HUGE machine like it was a Pro Stocker, and shifted like Ronnie Sox at the ‘74 Winternationals. It was unbelievable; an honor to behold.
”That was a GREAT run,” I said.
He exhaled slowly. We wheeled around to the booth for the ticket.
“Seventeen six, that’s looking more like it’s supposed to.”

Little River Dragway in Holland, TX hosts an annual semi truck show & drag race around Veterans Day weekend. www.littleriverdragway.com
Special thanks to Mike and to Roadblock. Yes, that’s a Smokey & the Bandit T-shirt. That’s how I knew it was all gonna come together.

Copyright 2021 Scott Beckwith