Sidewinder Dakota « Banks Blog - diesel performance

23.6 MPG from a Truck that Runs 222 MPH!

by Peter Treydte

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

OK, you haven’t heard from me in a while and I’m going to use the same excuse as everyone else; Power Tour, blah, blah, blah. But since I am doing so, I would like to continue my theme on fuel economy with a report from the Power Tour. As you know, we took five vehicles on the Tour, four trucks with diesels of various flavors and one truck with a twin turbo small block Chevy. One of the trucks that completed the entire 1700+ mile trip was the Banks Sidewinder Dakota. You remember this truck, it holds the world record as the fastest pickup truck at a top speed of 222 mph. The cool thing is, it is completely street drivable and is actually fun to drive. Now here are a couple of interesting factoids to consider:

* There were many exotic vehicles on the tour with a lot of horsepower. The Sidewinder was most likely the fastest vehicle that was on the tour with a verifiable (time slip) speed of 222 mph. Even with all the exotics there, I could not imagine any one of them being faster than the Sidewinder.

* During the trip, I kept track of the fuel economy on all of the vehicles. I was amazed to find that the Sidewinder Dakota achieved 23.6 MPG! It occurred to me that this might be the best fuel economy achieved on the Power Tour. The only possible exception that I can think of is that there were a few tuner cars of the 4-cylinder variety, and possibly some cars that the drivers didn’t really consider hot rods that may have gotten a little better fuel economy, but certainly none that were on a par with the Sidewinder in terms of power and speed capability. And mind you, none of us were driving conservatively in order to achieve a decent fuel economy number. Heck, this was the Hot Rod Power Tour, you can imagine how these vehicles were driven.

So, you might ask, how do you achieve such good fuel economy with such a powerful vehicle? The trick is really as simple as…airflow. Part of an engine’s power output is consumed with overcoming restrictions to airflow. We call that the pumping losses of the engine; power that is consumed to overcome restrictions. As you remove the restrictions, the power is freed up to either deliver more power to the rear wheels, or that additional power can be conserved, resulting in better fuel economy. That, along with a proper tune on the engine results in great fuel economy. This is a principle that we use with all of our products and is the reason that customers commonly report improvements in fuel economy between 10 and 20 percent depending on their driving habits.

So having great power available doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to sacrifice fuel economy. The Sidewinder Dakota is proof of that.

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Tags: 222 mph, Sidewinder Dakota
Posted in Banks Trucks, Hot Rod Power Tour, Sidewinder Dakota | No Comments »

Shhhh… we’re working on some future stuff!

by John Espino

Wednesday, April 27th, 2005

A little while ago, I wrote in my first blog that we get our hands on some really neat, future stuff. A good example from the past was the powerplant for our Sidewinder Dakota truck. You know… that little red pickup that ended up smashing a number of speed records and went 222 m.p.h.? Well, that engine was a ‘03 common-rail Cummins that we just so happened to get in 2001 from the Cummins Skunkworks for our project.

Being that we are an actual engineering firm, we are trusted (having non-disclosure agreements in place helps) by a number of original equipment manufacturers (O.E.M.s) with some of the newest hardware and technology on the planet. Of course, we keep in close contact with these O.E.M.s through the entire project; letting them know our progress, where we find the good and the bad in their equipment. We share data and make recommendations that sometimes make it to the assembly lines.

Anyway, what I wanted to spill the beans on is the progress of our General Motors Duramax project. Our partners at GM have sent us a number of next-generation engines for our project vehicles, the Type-R (roadrace) and Type-S (street performance truck) that we’ve been hard at work making parts for.

Now, I won’t go into the Sidewinder Type-R Project right now ’cause I’ll write about it in a future blog (behind the scenes highjinks, not just bragging), but I recommend the following link for an over-load of info: (http://www.bankspower.com/projects/show/2-Banks-Sidewinder-GMC-Sierra)

Yes sir, these Duramax projects will get more than just a tuner box that’ll “juice” up their power. Aside from a complement of hard-core racing internals especially designed by us for the Duramax engine, they’ll each get an entirely new “brain.” That’s really what I want to gab about. The brain is based on a design by the Robert Bosch Corporation and the programming is being done from the ground up with the assistance of some equipment from ETAS (a division of BOSCH).

A couple of our engineers were working with a rep from Bosch’s engineering arm in Germany in our diesel engine dyno cell writing programs and tuning the engine. We had the rep here for a week to get us familiar with the software, but by Wednesday they pretty much had everything down and were able to make that engine purr like a kitten, bark like a dog or growl like a lion. Both the Duramax engine and the new brain work in complete harmony.

So, just what did we do with the extra time left that week? I think a better question is what would you do if you had complete control of a powerful diesel engine? Ever heard of the expression “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission?”

That’s right…play, and do things you don’t tell the boss about. One thing is for certain, our dogs were taught some new tricks, and the diesel world may never be the same for it.

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Tags: Sidewinder Dakota truck
Posted in Banks Vehicles, Sidewinder Dakota | No Comments »

See Sidewinder Run

by Pat Ganahl

Friday, November 15th, 2002

Seems like hardly a week goes by that we don’t have something new to tell you about Project Sidewinder. This one will be short.

The news is that we had a video crew at Bonneville to capture all the action and sounds surrounding our record attempts, and you can now sample it on our Sidewinder web site. Webmaster note: As this is a very old blog entry, the links have changed. You can now watch a cool video of the Sidewinder Dakota here…

Coupled with footage he had been shooting in our race shop as the truck was being built, Patrick McKinley of our Art Department has spliced together five short clips showing (1) the truck under construction, (2) driving into Bonneville towing its own trailer (not riding on one), (3) activity in the pits, (4) interviews with Gale, driver Don Alexander, and crew chief Sheldon Tackett, and (5) an actual run as seen from the ground, from the air, and inside the cab at speed.

To hear ambient sounds and music, especially for the interviews, you’ll obviously need speakers connected to your computer. If you don’t have a program called Quicktime loaded in your computer, you’ll have to do so. The page with the videos tells you where to click to download it. Then click on each video separately to view it. They’re very short, and they’ll be very small on your screen. But take a look. The one of the truck runing down the salt at 200+ mph—especially if you’re wired for sound—is worth the price of admission.

Patrick has also edited a 23-minute video of all aspects of the Sidewinder and its record-setting runs at Bonneville, culled and spliced from well over 15 hours of footage. It’s really good, and people who’ve seen it have been asking for copies. Word in the opulent and spacious Friday News office is that we are going to make multi-dupes of it and make them available to our customers so you can watch it—full sight and sound—on your home VCR’s. It’s not ready now, but watch this space to see if and when it will be available.