The Dork-O-Motive Podcast

Cummins diesel engines are an American institution.

They've been one of the most massive manufacturers of diesel engines in the United States for more than 100 year now, but did you that they have an incredible history in racing, tied to the Indy 500.

From 1931-1952 Cummins ran five different cars with five different engines at the 500 and all of them are amazing. Cummins is credited for more Indy 500 firsts than any other single person or entity in the history of the race. This is the complete history of Cummins at the Indy 500.

Their most massive and well known headline was winning the pole in 1952 but that was a moment 40 years in the making. In this video you'll learn about the cars, the people, and take a deep technical dive into the engines that defined these events and Cummins as a company. These were production diesel engines mixing it up with racing engines on equal footing.

It's one of the most surprisingly cool racing stories in American motorsports history.

This is the story of how a 1979 AMC AMX won its class at the 1979 24 Hours of the Nurburgring. Not only that, how it was done with two hastily built cars, a group of six drivers that included a Hollywood star, and how they did it all on street tires.

Oh, they also had a one armed German driving instructor. Not all publicity stunts are made the same and this video will be proof of that. In this case, Gary Pace of BFG had a big idea and teamed up with just the right people to execute it. Not only that, they had an ace up their sleeve which has gone largely ignored or simply not reported to this point in history.

The first American team to ever compere at the 24 Hours of The 'Ring battled hard for 24 hours against the elements, exhaustion, their cars...and the competition? Watch and find out why that's the ultimate question

Incredibly, nitro powered drag racing nearly didn't survive the 1970s. It is a story often lost to modern history but it's a harrowing tale of shortages, price escalation, racer intervention, and the survival instincts of racers in Top Fuel and Nitro Funny Car.

In this podcast we examine the tumultuous decade that saw performances escalate, star power grow, and in the end, the sport brought to its very knees as its most famous lifeblood was nearly stolen from it.

Would you believe that many racers were advocating for its end in drag racing? They were and the proof is in here.

Drag racing history isn't all about the records set on the track, it's often about the survival of its cars, of its venues, and of its fuel off of it.

It was late 1956 and craftsmen in Turin were thrashing to complete the latest, mosrt beautiful, and most complex project they had ever done for Chrysler.

It was a concept car called The Norseman and it was both an exceptional design and a near impossible build.

After missing its first shipping date, the job was finished a month later and the car ewas hurriedly placed on the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria, one of the best known ships in the world, for its trip to New York City. No one outside of the factory in Turin that produced it had ever seen the car in person. It would be a grand reveal.

The Stockholm was a much smaller ocean liner, in fact the smallest to be sailing the high seas in that class of ship at the time. A little more dowdy than the Andrea Doria, it was a tough ship with an ice breaking prow that could smash its way through just about anything.

This is the story of the disaster that befell these two ships and sent one of the most beautfiul Detroit dream cars, concept cars, or idea cars ever created to the bottom of the sea forever.

The story of drag racing is typically seen as one defined by insane horsepower. The super fuels, the massive blowers, the acceleration that is unmatched by any wheel driven vehicle on Earth.
 
But that actually isn't the root of the story.
 
The real foundation of it all? Traction. And where did that come from? It came from tire shops at first. Taking old passenger car tires and gluing more rubber on them than they were ever supposed to hold.
 
Next it came from a genius of a man from a small town in Massacusetts who quite literally invented the scratch built drag slick. And it's only gotten faster from there. This is the story of the genesis of traction. Of the birth of the one thing that drag racing has relied on more than nitromethane, more than superchargers, and more than steel tubing.
 
Slicks.
 
The tires that make drag racing the incredible sport that it is today.