Cool Bus: Because a School Bus Needed to Do Wheelies
Ken Nelson Decided the Longest Thing at the Dragstrip Should Run on Two Wheels
Ken Nelson already knew how to build wheelstanders. In fact, he had built enough of them that another car or pickup was beginning to create a marketing problem.
Once the crowd has seen several vehicles charge down a dragstrip with their front tires hanging in the air, the next one needs something besides horsepower to get anybody out of the concession line.
Nelson needed a vehicle people would remember before he even started the engine.
He chose a school bus.
There are easier shapes to turn into race cars. There are shorter ones. There are lighter ones. There are quite a few that do not arrive from the factory looking as though their main performance requirement is stopping every three blocks.
None of those looked like a school bus doing a wheelstand.
There Was No Reason to Use an Actual Bus
A real school bus carries acres of steel, rows of seats and enough weight to make a blown big-block wonder what it had done wrong. Nelson did not need any of that. He needed the audience to recognize a school bus from the grandstands and then watch it do something no school transportation department had requested.
So Cool Bus was purpose-built exhibition machinery under a fiberglass school-bus body. It stretched more than twenty feet from nose to tail, which is a generous amount of vehicle to point toward the sky.
The length was part of the attraction. A small pickup running on its rear tires was already a familiar dragstrip stunt. A twenty-foot yellow bus doing it looked as though somebody had found an overlooked paragraph in the laws of physics.
The Engine Went Where the Kids Normally Sat
Wheelstanders need weight and horsepower near the rear axle, so Nelson put both where a few rows of children would normally have been complaining about who got the window seat.
A blown and injected Chevrolet big-block sat toward the rear, burning alcohol and producing roughly 1,000 horsepower. A Turbo 400 automatic carried the power to the rear axle.
The assignment was straightforward. The engine did not need to transport thirty passengers across town. It needed to convince the front half of a twenty-foot bus that pavement was optional.
It proved very persuasive.
The Driver Wasn’t Where the Driver Belonged
Putting Nelson behind the windshield in the traditional school-bus position would have moved useful weight in exactly the wrong direction, so the real driver’s seat was farther back, around the middle of the machine.
That solved the weight problem and created a visual one. Everybody knows where a school-bus driver sits, and an empty windshield would have spoiled the act before it started.
Sometimes a dummy occupied the normal driver’s position.
From the grandstands, there was the fellow driving the bus. Farther back sat the fellow actually driving the bus.
Very few school districts have experimented with that seating arrangement.
Then Twenty Feet of Bus Stood Up
The gag worked because everything looked familiar before Nelson touched the throttle. Yellow body. School-bus markings. Flashing lights. Enough visual clues that nobody needed an announcer to explain the vehicle.
Then the big-block came up, Nelson hit the throttle and the front tires left the pavement.
The nose kept climbing until an object associated with morning routes, vinyl seats and being late for class was charging down the quarter-mile on its rear tires.
That was the sales pitch.
There was no complicated racing class to understand and no need to explain the engineering. The bus was doing a wheelie. Either that worked for you or you had probably attended the wrong event.
Twelve Seconds Was Plenty Fast
Cool Bus reportedly ran in the mid-twelve-second range. By drag-racing standards, plenty of cars at the track could cover the quarter-mile quicker.
Those cars were using all four tires like responsible machinery.
Nelson was running a school bus with half of them in the air.
Elapsed time had become secondary. Nobody bought a ticket hoping the yellow bus would set low ET. They wanted to know how far down the track Nelson could carry the front wheels before gravity collected what it was owed.
Twelve seconds gave everybody enough time to appreciate the problem.
One Trick Wasn’t Enough Forever
Exhibition racing has a simple difficulty: today’s outrageous act becomes next year’s familiar one. Once spectators had seen Cool Bus stand up, Nelson added more reasons to keep watching.
Sparks appeared. Fireworks joined the program. Nighttime runs gave the whole production additional opportunities to misbehave.
Cool Bus became a regular attraction on drag-racing exhibition programs and the IHRA tour, where children understandably loved it. Adults had spent years explaining that horseplay on a school bus was prohibited.
Ken Nelson arrived with a blown Chevrolet, stood one on its rear tires and threw sparks behind it.
The children had a stronger presentation.
The Size Made the Joke Work
Wheelstanders depend on the audience understanding what the vehicle normally does. A car belongs on four tires. A pickup belongs on four tires. A school bus, carrying twenty feet of body and every visual suggestion of responsible transportation, emphatically belongs on four tires.
That made the wheelstand look even more wrong.
When Cool Bus raised its nose, a tremendous amount of yellow fiberglass headed upward. The basic stunt was familiar, but the vehicle made it new again.
Nelson had not invented a different way to perform a wheelstand. He had simply chosen something that had absolutely no business performing one.
Sometimes presentation saves a fellow a great deal of engineering.
In 2009, Gravity Collected
Wheelstanders operate under one particularly useful rule: sooner or later, the front end should come back down ahead of the rear end.
At Edinburg International Raceway in Texas in March 2009, Cool Bus stayed up too long.
It went over backward.
Hard.
More than twenty feet of school-bus body came down onto the racetrack in a crash that looked considerably worse for Nelson than it turned out to be. He climbed out without serious injury.
The bus was less fortunate.
Wheelstanders are very good at demonstrating weight transfer. Occasionally they continue the demonstration past the useful portion of the lesson.
So They Fixed the Bus
A rollover that dramatic could easily have ended the act, but Cool Bus had become too recognizable to discard because gravity had won one round.
The machine was repaired and returned to exhibition duty. By then Nelson had taken one of the most ordinary vehicles in American life and turned it into something spectators specifically paid to watch misbehave.
Replacing the machinery was possible. Replacing a yellow school bus everybody already recognized was another job entirely.
Then the Bus Graduated to Monster Trucks
Cool Bus eventually influenced longtime monster-truck racer Mike Vaters, the man behind Black Stallion. Vaters and Nelson discussed carrying the school-bus idea into monster trucks, and measurements from Cool Bus helped provide a starting point.
The result was Higher Education.
Now the school-bus concept could jump and crush cars too.
Nelson had spent years proving that a school bus could perform wheelstands. Vaters discovered there were still electives available.
The Joke Worked Before the Engine Started
Cool Bus’s greatest advantage was that nobody had to know its engine size, understand weight transfer or appreciate what a Turbo 400 was doing behind the blown Chevrolet.
They saw a school bus at the starting line.
Then the front wheels came up.
Done.
Nelson had already built six wheelstanders before Cool Bus. Number seven did not need a revolutionary drivetrain or a new theory of drag racing.
It needed a better reason for people to look up.
So he wrapped a 1,000-horsepower wheelstander in more than twenty feet of school bus and sent it down the quarter-mile on the rear tires.
There was no useful reason a school bus needed to do wheelies.
That was exactly why everybody wanted to see one.