BANKS SMASHES DURAMAX DRAG RECORD ... FIRST TRY!

BANKS SMASHES RECORD WITH DURAMAX-POWERED
SIDEWINDER DRAG TRUCK! FIRST TIME ON THE TRACK!
150.06 Mile Per Hour @ 8.648 seconds With NO Smoke!

Fontana, Calif. - - (Saturday, October 20, 2007) With an endurance Duramax road racing engine under the hood and not even so much as a few minutes of test running on the chassis dyno, the new Banks Sidewinder Type-D Chevrolet S-10 Saturday made both the quickest- and fastest-ever Duramax diesel-powered pass down a dragstrip at 150+ miles an hour and well under 9 seconds! Saturday at the California Speedway AutoClub Dragstrip was the first time that this Banks “Sidewinder” ever turned a wheel in competition anywhere.

“This is a new day in diesel drag racing,” Gale Banks proclaimed, “Those big, billowing, sooty, black smoke runs are history. Smoke is ‘low performance’. I prefer to burn all the fuel in the engine, it’s more powerful.” Banks’ mission has been clean, smoke-free performance out of every type of high-performance diesel-powered machine that he builds. “On Saturday, in a couple of hours and with only three passes, we changed the face of diesel drag racing.”

Of course Gale Banks is pretty well used to doing that, having set a (smoke-free) FIA World Record on the salt flats of Bonneville with a record-shattering two-way average of 217.306 miles-per-hour with a Cummins-powered Banks Sidewinder Dodge Dakota back in 2002.

On Saturday, October 20, the Banks Engineering crew bettered the existing Duramax quarter-mile record by over a second and more than 12 miles-per-hour faster with absolutely no smoke, from start-up, to staging, and for the full run itself. In fact, many of the fans on hand at the Fontana drags had no idea of what kind of powerplant was aboard that quick S-10 truck. Even before the surprisingly stock Duramax diesel had cooled down from it’s last run, the internet was buzzing with rumors and all sorts of wild conjecture about what was under that hood!

“The only thing that we want to smoke are the tires and the competition,” said Banks right after the three quick, clean runs. “Our first real purpose-built drag racing engine is just about to come out of the engine shop, but I wanted to see this S-10 make some runs so we stuck our road racing engine in. We were a little short on the rear axel ratio, we hit our 4750 RPM limiter two-thirds of the way down the track, and there’s quite a bit more in this one, mark my words.”

We’ll let the official NHRA-timed record stand for itself here: 150.06 miles per hour at 8.648 seconds, with a 60 foot time of 1.18 seconds. Half way down the track the Banks machine went through the 1/8-mile lights at 5.448 seconds already traveling at over 125 miles per hour. “Bare in mind,” Banks reiterated, “that all this first-time-on-the-track performance was achieved with an engine built for endurance racing, 25-hour road races, not 7-second runs down a drag strip.”

Many of the special new “BankSpeed™” components that are being field tested on the Type-D will be on general sale soon. The deep-breathing Banks Big Hoss Intake Manifolds for the Duramax engine already have a Banks part number and other BankSpeed™ items now seeing the heat of all-out competition will follow.

And we’ve saved the best part for last. After Banks installs the real drag racing engine, the 1,100 horsepower bullet that’s removed from the Type-D is one that could easily (and you know that Banks will) be installed in a street-legal truck and driven to the next drag racing event. In fact, you can bank on that!
Gale Banks Engineering is celebrating 50 powerful years in the business of making the finest in aftermarket engine enhancement products for both diesel- and gasoline-powered pickup trucks, SUVs, and motorhomes. For more information got to: www.bankspower.com

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THANKS VERY MUCH!

DOUG STOKES
CORPORATE PUBLICIST
GALE BANKS ENGINEERING