GRAND PRAIRIE, Alta. — They really aren’t angry; they just call themselves that. And they’re not exactly old, either, but Angry Old Men makes a catchy title. Together, they’re known as Anger Managment Inc., a bunch of guys from Grand Prairie, Alta. who run a 1969 Kenworth drag racer in their spare time — and have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.

Each of them works on or around trucks in real life, and this project sort of grew out of watching Gord Cooper and his Smokin’ Gun racing at an event in Grand Prairie in 2004 called Drag Wars. Cooper looked to be having a lot of fun, and a few of the crew thought they could do that too. So they did. They bought the truck and the engine, and spent from November that year ’til the spring of 2005 getting it all together.

Angry boys and their 1969 Kenworth drag racer

As the story goes, they’d been hard at it for a few weeks, and it was time to paint the truck. Of course, everyone had his own idea of how it should be done. When things came to a boil one evening, the painter, a fellow named Luther, suggested the crew ought to enlist an anger management consultant. That prompted the name, and as it turns out, the truck itself really is just that — serious recreation for a bunch of guys who put more than their time in from Monday to Friday.

The truck weighs 8,500 lb as you see it here, but Petryshyn says it needs to be closer to 8,000 to get near the 12-second mark.

“It’s just too heavy,” he says. “We’re always looking for ways to shave a few pounds off the weight.”

There’s certainly not much to strip away. It’s really already just an engine, a seat and wheels.

It’s got a 4-speed Allison automatic transmission and a serious turbocharger that draws in almost as much methanol as clean fresh air. They run a combination of diesel, methanol, and nitrous, pushing the torqued and tuned Cat to deliver somewhere in excess of 1,000 hp to the wheels.

There’s not a lot of money to be made with the enterprise, so all the expenses come from sponsorships and their own pockets. They race a few times each summer at Mission and Fort St. John in B.C., and at Calgary and Edmonton in their home province.

Watch for them next summer out at the quarter-mile track, and go on up and say hi. Don’t worry, Anger Managment’s just another name for a whole lot of fun.