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Chevrolet’s famed S10 is perhaps the most-utilized pickup truck body in all of drag racing, but in the grand scheme of all the possible makes and models of trucks and sedans out there, it still doesn’t get a lot of love. And that’s a shame, because it’s a great platform, it’s small and therefore light-weight and punches a likewise small hole in the air, will accommodate small-block or LS swaps with relative ease, and they look really fire when they’re “down in the dirt,” as South Dakotan Eric Jones puts it. And down in the dirt is precisely where you’ll find Jones’ sleek and ultra-fast S10 that he campaigns in small-tire no-time races in the upper Midwest.

Jones’ pickup ultimately came to life following a difficult shop fire that “literally torched” the prized El Camino he had been racing — but the story doesn’t start there, but rather, on Craigslist. Years prior to the blaze, Jones had purchased an S-10 for a future project. As he tells it, the truck “was pretty nice and unmolested. It was a nice foundation to start with… a factory vehicle that was well cared-for.”

“And so I had this S10 that I was going to put together as just a street truck…as a daily driver, but when my El Camino burned up, I was hot on the trail looking for something to race,” he continues. “We we looking at buying or building something, and that’s when I decided I really would like to build the S10. I like to have my own unique fingerprint on things, so we took that truck to my local chassis guy, Kris Dorneman at Kriscraft, and basically took the gloves off. My exact words were, ‘I wanted him to make it the baddest small-tire, stock suspension’ish vehicle that we possibly could, while keeping it steel body, steel quarters.”

“To be totally honest, we cut up a really nice pickup,” Jones admits.

Dorneman’s craftsmanship is seen throughout the build, and his fingerprint — with creative vision from Jones — is on every tube, every nut and bolt on it. “He did an amazing job.”

Jones started the project in 2019, it hit the ground in February of 2020, and he’s checked off two full seasons behind the wheel with some success.

The chassis was built using not chrome-moly or mild steel, but Docol, a high-strength engineered steel designed specifically for use in automotive and racing applications. The chassis meets a 6.0 e.t. 25.3 SFI certification. Norman retained about 20-inches of stock front framerail and 36-inches of inner, heavily modified stock frame in the rear, but is largely tube chassis at all points in between. It still has A-arm front suspension and leaf springs in the rear; TRZ parts up front with a Strange stiletto rack and Menscer double-adjustable shocks, and Landrum springs with Menscer shocks in the back.

Dorneman built the chassis around the steel cab and floors, then stripped the cab of all the “melt-able” items and powder-coated the chassis with the cab shell on it, so the floorpans and all could match seamlessly.

Power is compliments of a 598 cubic-inch big-block (to be punched out to 605 this season after a slight over-bore), assembled upon a Brodix aluminum block and cylinder heads massaged by RFD. A Bullet camshaft spins the valvetrain, and four nitrous kits (up from two) give it all the extra oomph it needs. A Callies Magnum crankshaft, Carillo aluminum rods, and Diamond pistons comprise the rotating assembly, and Crower shaft-mount rockers and lifters, and Trend pushrods, PAC springs and retainers make up the valvetrain. A Holley Domninator EFI system manages the operation, which features a ‘dry’ nitrous system plumbed by Induction Solutions. A custom Thomson Motorsports billet tunnel ram intake not found on many stock valve angle big-blocks was machined for the build that Jones says is, “an absolute piece of badassery…it’s way cool.”

“It is a guzzling machine,” Jones quips. ‘It should realistically, on a stock borespace with this 10.200-inch deck block, be in the 2,000 to 2,100 horsepower range. It’s nothing crazy exotic, but it’s definitely enough to get down there in e.t.”

A bolt-together 10-inch Neal Chance torque converter and a three-speed close-ratio Turbo 400 turn a QA1 carbon-fiber driveshaft and a Strange fabricated 9-inch with gun-drilled Strange axles and a 3.89 ratio gear.

Jones lives in Elkton, South Dakota, right on the Minnesota border, and frequents the Grove Creek Raceway’s no-time heads-up events, the SRD Shootouts held at Interstate Raceway, and has visited Sturgis Dragway and even trekked south to Missouri and Georgia. As a purely no-time machine, Jones is tight-lipped about the true performance of his nitrous-huffing machine, but gave some solid indications.

“It’ll run low fours, I will say that much,” Jones says, after confirming he “would have to kill us” if he told us his exact elapsed times. “It’s been in the bottom half of the 4-second range, and this year it should go bottom-bottom-bottom half fours. I can tell you the best 60-foot on it is 1.06, which is public information. That was done on radials at Truck Wars 9 down in Georgia.”

“The first year out we really struggled. Last year it came together, and we got one win and a number of runners-up. We also had several events where we went multiple rounds, so it was a pretty successful year. Ultimately, what helped the most was when I turned everybody else off — sometimes green racers expect there to be a magic nugget of information that fixed their whole program, but for me it was to stop listening to the forums and al this offer stuff and think about what is it doing and what is it not doing that I want it to do, and what can I do to make ti react the way I want it to. Incidentally, though the course of dealing with it, I learned some things on some aborted runs and really started to turn the program around. We just don’t race on radial-prep stuff, so you have to learn how to be a really good tuner. They’re super finicky up here in what they like and how you make them work; it’s got exponentially faster with time, and I’m hoping we can put it all together with a couple small changed this winter and can get a couple wins this season.”

Jones adds in closing, “I didn’t build it for the approval of others, but I’m partial to it, and I can honestly say that there’s a lot more potential there, and we’re going to exploit it. I don’t think we have the power to break it into the 3-second zone, but if I stay alive long enough, I want to see it get down there.”

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