Life started quiet differently for the Diesel Arrow

Originally the truck was a Ford cargo designed for circuit racing in the Super Truck Championship.

History
IT SEEMS an unlikely proposition, doesn’t it, finding exactly what you want parked under a convenient tree? Believe it or not but that is exactly what happened to Gavin Manning, team owner and driver of the #2 Diesel Racing Ford Cargo truck.

Gavin, who had his initial racing experience in the hurly-burly of speedway (mainly in Litre Cars) before moving onto the blacktop in a Ford Courier prepared for the Sports Truck class a few years back, actually found his racer under a tree in the yard of John Mineef’s Isuzu Wreck business in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield. So he brought it home to his base near Newcastle in the NSW Hunter Valley, parked it in the workshop and set to work.

A little bit of the work had already been done for him, he recalled.
“It had obviously started out as a race project for someone. It already had a (roll) cage in it and they must have either run out of money or just gotten sick of it early,” he said.
The cage was kept, along with a chassis rail, the front I-beam axle and the cab. The rest was junked.
The basic cab-over configuration with the independent Ford ladder frame chassis (with some modifications) has been retained for racing.
Gavin found the truck in early 1999 and set to work, his small team taking 14 months and more than 4000 man hours to bring it to race-ready stage.
Their initial engine choice was a 10.6 litre, inline six-cylinder John Deere with intercooled twin turbochargers staged, incidentally, with a primary blower feeding into a secondary blower to increase charge pressure.
At an Oran Park meeting in mid-2001 the John Deere let go, suiciding in a big way in what Gavin describes as “thermal detonation”, a phenomenon caused by sudden super-high intake temperatures.
“The Achilles Heel of our John Deere engine was that the intercooler was too small. After a few laps it stopped cooling the air going into the engine and turned into a toaster, overheating the thing.”
So in 2001 Gavin bought a Detroit Diesel Series 60 engine, a 12.7 litre, inline six with cross flow head, overhead camshaft and four valves per cylinder.
The team once again had a twin-turbo development ready to go but rather than the staged set-up used on the John Deere this latest configuration had both turbos operating at the same time, one on the first three cylinders, the other on the second three.

The big Detroit motor is surprisingly standard. It has all Detroit Diesel internals and a stock bottom-end which has been modified. Even top-end work is limited because of the fairly complex design of the cylinder head.
The turbochargers are basic IHI units but the manifolding on the exhaust side of the set-up has all been done in-house (and very neatly, too) with self-designed “in tractors” (the opposite of extractors) on the intake manifold to bring boost pressures up to around 45psi.
Power output? “If we get what we want out of it -- what we think we are getting -- we should have around 865kW (1150bhp) at about 2650rpm,” Gavin says.
To put the power to the ground the truck has a semi-automatic, four-speed 743 Allison gearbox with direct drive, power shift and no torque converter.
It drives to a custom-made differential which sounds like the old homily “something old, something new, something borrowed.....” with an Eaton crown wheel and pinion, a custom diff carrier, Isuzu outer tubes and hubs and torque-link control.
The diff, incidentally, is fully-locked for racing purposes to get maximum drive exiting corners. The suspension, especially at the back, owes more than a little to Gavin Manning’s speedway experiences with its four-bar radius rod "birdcage" rear-end.

The speedway racing connection is also evident in the spring and shock absorber choice, the truck running with Afco coilovers (Afco is an American speedway equipment manufacturer and supplier) front and rear.
The diff has a damper mounted on a torque rod and the rear-end also has a Panhard bar.
The front suspension is more traditional; Gavin and team engineer "Big John" Ramsay opting for a four-bar radius rod on the Ford I-beam axle.
Steering is by power-assisted worm and nut, the team fitting a GMC unit and front spindles which necessitated converting the truck to left-hand-drive.
"Everything comes off as a left-hand-drive," says Gavin, "simply because it was dictated by the American parts we used."
The brakes are rippers, as they must be to bring the 5650kg (minimum class weight is 5550kg) truck to heel from 160km/h.
The team has used Bendix brakes all-round, 350mm (14-inch) diameter ventilated units with two-spot Bendix calipers, water-cooling and intensified vacuum-over-hydraulic power assistance.
Gavin has a balance bar in the cockpit so that he can adjust the front/rear bias to suit varying fuel loads and tyre wear.
That fuel load, incidentally, is not exactly insubstantial, the Cargo carrying 120 litres into battle and using about one litre per lap (at Oran Park).

The truck’s transformation into a salt lake Machine…

Salt lake - March 2005
Work in progress...Late 2005
Salt lake - 2006
On the way to the cancelled 2007 meeting