The Professor

Ross Simpson’s 1970 Toyota Crown has lived more lives than most. It began when Ross’s dad was trading in his Valiant. The deal with the salesman was simple: the Toyota had to tow the family caravan up Wheelers Hill in Melbourne’s south-east. The Crown passed the test, and from that day it became part of the Simpson family. Ross learned to drive in it, passed his licence test in 1974, and when his parents moved to Queensland in late 1982, he was handed the keys. The Crown lived on as the family car once again, this time for Ross and his future wife.

After the wedding, the original Toyota engine began to fade. Ross replaced it with a 283 small block Chev, a Turbo 350 auto, a 9 inch Ford rear end, and four wheel disc brakes. The Crown served faithfully until 1993, when a roadside check revealed it wasn’t engineered. With hopes of getting it back on the road, Ross left it in the driveway, but that never happened.

Rather than let it fade away, Ross imagined a new future, turning the old family car into a 2WD pulling truck. Through the late 1990s and 2000s, Ross began collecting parts. Sprint car hardware formed the base: block, crank, and cam, later complemented by Racer Pro cylinder heads and a three-piece sprint car fuel injection system.

As it all came together piece by piece, the Crown was close to completion, fitted with a methanol-fueled 427 cubic inch small block Chev, a heavy duty Powerglide auto with a 2200-stall converter, a Road Ranger gearbox, and an Albion diff. It first ran Firestone tyres, later swapped for Cepek tyres mounted on custom double bead-lock wheels fabricated in-house along with much of the chassis and bodywork. The iconic 2WD truck was born.

Naming the 2WD truck came down to a few options, Toy Boy and Not the Crown among them, but Ross settled on The Professor, a nickname given to him years earlier by a manager at his cousins’ transport company for his knack of bringing machinery “back from the dead.”

The years of hard work paid off when The Professor debuted at the 2016 Bushy Park Tractor Pull in Gippsland. The run was rough: the track lacked traction, the light front end left Ross staring at the sky, the steering brakes were almost useless, and fuel flooding the engine between runs made things difficult. But despite the issues, the dream had finally come alive.

During the 2017 - 2018 season the 2WD truck improved, with the 2018 Tooradin Tractor Pull being its strongest performance, with a few mechanical gremlins ironed out, things were looking up - until a breakage in the distributor caused the loss of one cylinder. Soon after, at the 2018 Quambatook Tractor Pull, an oil related engine failure changed The Professor’s fate. With finances stretched, the truck was parked up once again.

Since then, The Professor has remained a talking point among pullers, with plenty of anticipation for its comeback. Ross has confirmed that work is underway to bring The Professor back, this time with a few surprises. After all these years, its return is bound to turn heads!