Indiana native Bryan Wright and his bright-red 1946 Chevrolet pickup are an unmistakable presence at virtually any racetrack on any given weekend, because…well, it’s bright red, and more importantly, there really isn’t another truck quite like it.
Wright’s classic Chevy hauler is a decades-in-the-making work-in-progress, evolving a number of times throughout its second lease on life as a street/strip machine. From his teen years to the present, much in the same path as his own knowledge and skills, Wright has taken it from the simple to the extreme.
Wright has been a hot rod fanatic for much of his life — “probably before I could walk,” he says — a byproduct of his father’s interest in performance automotive pursuits. Bryan’s father would take him along to local cruise-ins and car shows, and soon enough, the hook was set.
“My dad and I would go to the local dragstrip to watch the races, probably well before I was five years old. I enjoyed watching and continued going to the dragstrip up into my teen years,” Bryan says. “I was really interested in the Fastest Street Car shootout stuff that was going on in the early 1990s, and there was one cruise-in that changed everything for me. There were a group of guys with some pretty fast street cars that would show up, and they were doing burnouts, nitrous purges, and cars were launching in the street. That did it for me — that’s when I knew that I wanted to race and have something fast. The catch was that I wanted to have a fast street car, not a pure race car.”
Many years later, Wright’s passion for racing runs as deep as he envisioned it. In fact, his life largely revolves around racing. When he’s not competing in his prized pickup, or building up and tinkering with other projects with his wife, Leanna, he’s clocked in at Longacre Racing, part of the AFCO Performance Group.
“Over the years I have mostly raced this truck, but there was a time when I parked it for a couple of…
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