keep the Powerglide competitive at every level of
drag racing.
Wendell helped bring Sonnax on board to spon-
sor Lea’s build. In addition to her 1.58 gear set,
she’s fully outfitted with the company’s extreme
duty shafts, unique ring gear stabilizer, Smart-
Tech ® servo and Smart-Tech ® 10-clutch drum.
“Fifteen years ago, you still used a lot of the orig-
inal parts to put a Powerglide together,” Wendell
said. “Today you can build a brand-new Power-
glide and not have one stock part in it. Just shows
the demand for and popularity of the Powerglide.
Sonnax is a big part of that. Everybody looks at me
as the guy that builds the high-end stuff, but be-
cause of the diversity that Sonnax has, the bracket
racer that’s only making 800HP can still come to
me, and I can still give him a custom build, but it’s
not at the same price as what we’re doing with Lea.”
“I think a lot of people don’t put enough thought
into the fact that, when you need a good transmis-
sion and torque converter, technology has changed
a lot in the last few years,” said Lea’s husband,
Gary, whom she credits as the mechanical genius
behind the Lead Sled. “If you’re not keeping up
with that stuff, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
The transmission is the bones, and the converter
is a tunable piece that can create either a really
good pass or cruddy pass. You use an inferior
component and, under the stress that we’re put-
ting it under, it’s just a question of when — not
IF — it’s going to fail. We did everything we could
to eliminate that risk, so this new Lead Sled is a
whole different animal. It performs better and
drives better than the old one. We did shakedown
passes, and our guy was like, ‘Holy smokes, this
car — you could drive it with two fingers!’ which
is impressive when you’re talking about how fast
it actually is.”
Lea deeply appreciates all that Wendell has
done for her racing program, she said.
“He builds our transmission, but I also consider
him a very good friend. He believed in our team
before the car was even fin-
ished and wanted to be a part
of it. When we were thrash-
ing to get ready for the big
reveal — we basically took
a shell of a car and rebuilt
it in four days — Gary and
I hadn’t slept for 48 hours.
Wendell came over to help
and suddenly said, ‘Hey, you
don’t have a new converter.’ I
was like, oh shoot! We don’t have a converter! So
he reached out to Joe Rivera at ProTorque and
got an amazing converter delivered overnight.”
As the Ochs look ahead to a season packed with
big races, they’re happy the Lead Sled’s transmis-
sion is one thing they won’t have to worry about.
“I don’t think your best-of-the-best motor can
GEAR SETS • SERVOS • DRUMS • SHAFTS
TRACK-PROVEN TO 2 , 500 + HP
Ask for Sonnax Products from Your Performance Parts Distributor
April 2019
GETTING THE POWER TO THE GROUND
The blue Sonnax servo is a dead giveaway that
there’s a lot more going on inside Lea’s Powerglide
than might meet the eye. Packed with Sonnax
transmission upgrades rated for 2,500+HP and
a race-ready converter, it’s fully capable of
handling everything her new car — the Lead Sled
Resurrection — can throw at it.
perform like it should if you don’t put the atten-
tion on the other pieces,” Lea said. “Now I can just
get in the car and drive and it performs. If we do
have an issue, it’s a quick fix because we partnered
with the right people, people we respect, that we
like and feel are a good fit. That’s important to
me and gives me a lot of confidence.”
Get Your Gearhead On
www.sonnax.com
DragIllustrated.com
| D r a g I l l u s t r a t e d | 101