Ivan Stewart a Winner as a Truck Builder Too
Ivan Stewart isn’t satisfied with winning almost every off-road race he enters with his $1-million-plus Toyota truck.
Now off-road racing’s Ironman is into the truck building business. With partner Bill Savage, he is building low-budget racing trucks to sell for a fraction of what his Precision Preparation Inc.-built Toyota costs. SCORE International, sanctioning body for a seven-race desert series, was so impressed with the Stewart-Savage line that it created a separate class: Protruck.
Stewart’s Toyota runs in the Trophy-Truck class, off-road racing’s premier category.
“Having a class for spec trucks is a project Bill and I have been working on for more than a year,” Stewert said from his shop in Santee, where the trucks are assembled after the parts are built in Savage’s shop in Vista. “The cost of high-tech racing trucks had gone so high it was keeping a lot of guys from racing. Ours make racing affordable again.
“I got the idea of building a line of trucks with all the chassis and running parts alike, so a guy can buy one, put his own engine in it and go racing. You can get one for $75,000, put out $5,000 for a small block engine--a Ford, Chevy or Chrysler--and be ready for the next race.”
That is less than a third of what the average Trophy-Truck costs. They run around $350,000. And the Toyota is three times that because it is a one-of-a-kind V-6 built with space-age technology to race--and win--against higher horsepower V-8s.
“We ran two of our trucks as an experiment in the Baja 1000, and the response since then has been enormous,” said Savage, who has been building race cars of one kind or another for 26 years. “Bud Feldkamp went all the way in one. He had some problems but finished in 28 hours.”
The overall winner, Dale White of Las Vegas, finished in a little under 22 hours, driving a Chevrolet truck.
“After Baja, we had more orders than we could fill in time for Parker, but five of our trucks will be on the starting line,” Savage said.
The 23rd Parker 400, opening race of the SCORE season, will be run Saturday--the Trophy-Trucks at 7:30 a.m. and the other classes at 11 a.m. Both events start from the Blue Water Marina in Parker, Ariz.
One of the five Protrucks will be driven by Indy car owner Rick Galles and his son, Jaime, who competes in the Sports Car Club of America’s Trans Am series. The elder Galles was an off-road racer in the late ‘70s, before he entered the Indy car scene.
Stewart, in his 14th year with Toyota, is driving the only V-6 in the Trophy-Truck class. He is defending champion at Parker, where he has won four times.
“The first race is always an important one for me,” said Stewart, 50. “If I win the first race, it lets the other fellows know that I’ll still around.”
Stewart, from Alpine, Calif., collected a $50,000 bonus for winning the championship last year. It was his eighth driver’s title, to go with 80 race victories.
Motor Racing Notes
STOCK CARS--The Winston West championship series will start Sunday in Tucson without a defending champion. Doug George, the 1995 winner, left to race in NASCAR’s SuperTruck series. Larry Gunselman of Snohomish, Wash., will get the ride in George’s winning Ford Thunderbird. Southwest Tour champion Lance Hooper of Palmdale will be making his Winston West rookie debut in the Winter Heat 150 on Tucson Raceway Park’s three-eighths-mile paved oval.
INDY CARS--Another Formula One veteran is coming to the Indy car circuit. Mark Blundell of England, who has 61 Grand Prix starts dating to 1990, has signed to drive for the Pac West team as a teammate of another Formula One expatriate, Mauricio Guglelmin of Brazil. . . . A.J. Foyt named Scott Sharpe to drive one of his cars in the Indy Racing League series, which opens Jan. 27 at Walt Disney World. Davey Hamilton is Foyt’s other driver.
MISCELLANY--The Southern California demolition derby championship will be held Saturday night in Anaheim Stadium, with the state championship one week later in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. . . . The U.S. Auto Club’s Silver Crown series for open cockpit cars has scheduled a 100-mile race Oct. 20 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.
