Unsung Champion: 1993 Dodge Caravan

dB Drag Racing Champion Steve Cook Gets Some Credit

By Mikey Cajayon

Photography by John Skalicky

In every industry, sport, work environment, and family there always seems to be a person who makes a little more effort to stand out, but somehow doesn't get the recognition for it. Thirty-year-old Steve Cook can relate. He's gone the extra mile and definitely deserves a little more attention. While Alma Gates continues to get the publicity, the three-time dB Drag Racing champ garners only a mention here and there and, sometimes, not even that. But all that is about to change. Steve started his SPL quest in 1995 with the purchase of a very soccer-mom-like 1993 Dodge Caravan. But you can't judge this Caravan on the vehicle category it belongs to. Certainly there's nothing visually spectacular about it, but the point of employing this minivan had nothing to do with its looks. Steve had fooled around with SPL and big bass for a few years and was ready to get down to business. A van was the way to go; and the Dodge literally afforded him the opportunity.

"Bass. I love the feeling of sitting in a car with low bass," Steve says enthusiastically with a kind of glazed look on his face. If you take a look at Steve's track record, you'll see that there's no doubt where his heart is. So far this year, he has won at the Daytona Spring Break Nationals (171.7 dB), a Springfield, Missouri Triple-Point event (172.0 dB), and in his own backyard at the Audio X Summer Nationals in Tuscumbia, Alabama with a massive, record-setting 172.8 dB. However, the highlight for Steve was setting the overall USAC SPL record with a remarkable 169.4 dB on the dreaded B&K meter to beat out the likes of Alma Gates and Jaime Delapaz.

Quite recently, SPL enclosures have undergone a few changes. In years prior, winning consisted of using mammoth amounts of subwoofers in small sealed boxes with significant power. But insanity has stricken the SPL scene. Today's vehicles use less woofers in large ported enclosures, and extreme power levels that exceed the power of entire systems of yesteryear on a single sub. "I always try to do something different. Back when everyone was using Cerwin Vega Stroker subs in large vented enclosures, I decided to try other woofers in a similarly built enclosure," says Steve. "You see, Strokers were the commanding force that brought about modern SPL enclosures (vented) in an era that was mainly dominated by sealed boxes. So I stuck a PPI flat piston sub in one of those Stroker [sized] enclosures and it did awesome! I was doing it different and winning. Next thing I knew, other competitors were doing the same thing," he says.

Being one of the first people to win with a vented enclosure, Steve expanded on the concept. Never looking back, he has continued to experiment with hundreds of different designs and it is obviously resulting in rich dividends.

The Caravan has evolved to the point where it now houses just four 15-inch subs in a box configuration that is very hard to describe. By gutting the van's interior, Steve was able to fit in a wall-to-wall sub enclosure. The outer walls are made from 1" MDF; however, it is the material attached to the MDF that really makes the box so strong. With the exception of the floor, there is a small distance from the outside wall of the box to the sheet metal of the van. On the top and sides of the box, Steve used six different types of dampening and reinforcing. It ranges from wood, to fiberglass, to steel. He won't get more specific than that. The composition of the material may not weigh the same as concrete -- others have used concrete in their setups -- but the walls of Steve's enclosure, including the back wall, are every bit as strong.

Another trick every SPL freak should know is to seal the cabin. To get this done, Steve tore out the dash and everything that would unbolt, all the way to the firewall. The rules in dB Drag Racing require the vehicle to be driveable, so all of the driving essentials had to stay, including the steering column, brake and gas.

To avoid air leakage, thus reducing the loss of sound pressure, Steve went around the steering column with fiberglass mat to seal it to the steel shaft. He then cut a hole the diameter of the column in a piece of wood, and slid it over the steering column and into place. A resin soaked mat and a rubber boot were applied to further ensure the seal. The gas and brake were done in much the same way. "The van is still totally driveable, but I wouldn't drive it for more than 20 feet and in a straight line," Steve says with a smile.

Door seals are not as extreme as you might find with some competitors, but fall in line with the standard set by the rest of the install. The van's window seals were all replaced with new rubber; and the factory latch still opens and closes the door. But, from the outside, Destaco clamps securely lock the door down and make sure no air enters or escapes.

Electrical power for the system starts with three Stinger 200 amp alternators. Brackets had to be custom made to hold all three around the transversely mounted motor. They're all controlled by regulators set at a charge voltage of 17.5 volts. That's over three volts more than the system in a typical car.

Steve needs 17.5 volts because he is using eight 8-volt batteries wired in series to create a 16-volt battery system. Why? Because the Crossfire BMF1000D amplifiers he is using make substantially more power when the voltage is increased. Rules prohibit anything more than 18 volts, but that is probably beyond the threshold of the amplifiers capabilities.

Just aft of the sub enclosure is where all this high voltage resides. To get there, six snakes of 1/0 power wire are fed from the alternators to batteries. The batteries are connected with custom-routered copper buss bars. With each pair of batteries wired in series for 16 volts, the buss bars extend towards the front and up the back of the sub box. Here a terminal holds down a short, 1-foot piece of 4-gauge power cable to each amp.

The runs are kept short intentionally to make sure each of the 16 BMF1000D amps has a minimal voltage loss. The powerful Crossfire class D amps are configured in a bridged mode that allows a pair of them to be used as one. Each pair of these amplifiers drives one voice coil on each of the four dual 2-ohm, 15-inch subs. Steve estimates the current configuration scorches with nearly 20,000 watts of total power. So the big question is, what kind of subs can take that kind of abuse? Digital Designs. DD is headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and has been producing top notch subs since 1986. Known mostly in the Pro Audio market, their subs have always been available to anyone who wanted to abuse them. Serious SPL is now one of the company's biggest markets thanks their work with Steve and extreme aficionados like him.

The way the DD subs are mounted inside the van is rather peculiar. "People always come up to the van, take a look inside and say, 'Man, that'll never work.' That makes me really happy," says a smiling Steve. Looking at it myself, I understand where these questions come from, but how Steve came up with the design is difficult to understand. "I've spent so much time experimenting with things -- it's crazy. I like to just go into my shop at night and go into the zone. I forget about time and the phone and eating -- I just try things," explains Steve.

Inside the van, the box no longer has a front. It's basically a 5-sided enclosure. The best way to describe it is to imagine taking an oil drum and cutting it in half. You then mount the woofer on the top. Do this four times and arrange the subs two high and two across. Weld them together where the frames touch and you have Steve's "enclosure." As crazy as this seems, that's how it is.

To make the oil-drum-like tubes the subs fit in, Steve went to a steel fabricator. They took sheet steel nearly a quarter-inch thick and rolled it into a tube, welding the seam. The top plate is a piece of half-inch steel with the hole for the sub. From there, the group of four subs is suspended inside the box. It literally sits in the middle of the box with nothing to hold it but steel bars from the floor to the frame of the joined subs. To feed his tweak-and-tune needs, the entire structure can be moved front and back nearly six inches. Steve describes how he eventually wound up with his current setup: "I started this with eight subs in the same large port configuration. I was hitting some high 160s, but then I dropped to just six subs and my SPL went higher. Believe it or not, going down to four made it go even higher. So then I re-did the whole structure the way it is now, moving the subs way back and it continued to get louder. Now with the four that move, I can totally tune so I get max SPL."

With so much emphasis on super power amps, subs, and batteries, you almost forget that something has to feed a signal to the system. For that Steve uses what he calls one of the best CD players ever, the Rockford Fosgate RFX 8140. No longer in production, the unit has up to 8 volts of unbalanced output and 16 volts out with a balanced connection. He previously used an AudioControl EQX and Overdrive, but found he just didn't need it; the 8140 had plenty of juice.

All this work has paid off. A competitor for six years, Steve has won nearly everything he has entered. As the 5-time USAC champ, 3-time dB Drag Racing champ and the current world record holder in both, Steve has set the bar very high.

One of the champion's biggest gripes about the current state of SPL affairs is what he characterizes as a "lack of pride" in many competitors. "You see these guys in cars that look like they got them for free at the junkyard. They dumped in some cement and woofers and now they're competing," he says. "If some of these guys were serious, they would at least make their cars look good."

Steve has a high opinion of the SPL community as a whole, but he just wishes some people would take a little more pride in a vehicle's cosmetics. Overall, though, he's thankful for the opportunity to meet so many great people at all the shows over the years.

Tough competitors as well as a lack of prize money has Steve putting the majority of his energy into his retail store, Audio X, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He is even very serious when he says he would sell the Caravan if the right person came in with the right amount. How much is that? Steve says you can contact him directly to find out.

People who have worked with Steve say he has talked about retiring recently. But then their bets are also on Steve to win at this years' Finals -- all of them! Steve says his new passion is his store and that these new guys are just too hard to keep up with. Sounds like the champ may be lying in wait. We'll have to see.