As the old proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and when Greg Fleetwood had a particular need that couldn’t be filled with what was readily available to the public, he set about fabricating it himself.

“The idea was already there,” said Fleetwood, a custom paint and body man who also boasts 17 years of experience in fabrication. “About 15 years ago I built a miniature version of this for my brother to haul a junior dragster on top of his car. It worked on a winch, and the junior dragster is pretty light so we could muscle it up there if we needed to.”

Fleetwood had already built a smaller version of the open stacker trailer a little over 10 years earlier.

Fast forward to 2023 and Fleetwood’s daughter, Dorothy, had turned 18 and he thought it was time that she graduated to a full-size dragster. The problem was that the new dragster, combined with Fleetwood’s 1972 Chevelle, would not fit in their existing trailer, and he didn’t have the room to store a longer trailer at Phoenix, Arizona-based home.

“There were no stacker trailers for less than $30,000 used,” Fleetwood explained, “so I decided at the end of 2023 that I would build an open stacker.”

For the foundation of the build, Fleetwood started looking around and bought a 26-foot open trailer with a 10,400-pound capacity. He and his father began researching what they would need and how they might engineer such a feat.

“I didn’t know anything about hydraulics. I tried to do some research online, but found it hard to find the right information.” They watched numerous videos on car haulers and Fleetwood found a local business that constructed car haulers for 18-wheelers.

“I told him I was looking for pumps and rams and explained to him what I wanted to do,” Fleetwood tells us. “He took me for a tour of the whole shop and I saw how they built them and that helped me out.”

After getting a quote from the company for the parts he would need, Fleetwood thought it best to shop around and found better deals. He even bought the hydraulic pump right off of Amazon.

“Myself and my dad built the upper deck from scratch and I built the ram supports and sliders. It was just the two of us. My dad is 76 years old and was chomping at the bit to do some welding, as he’s a lifelong welder. We built and painted it and it was out of the shop in 14 days.” Fleetwood built the hinges for the upper deck from hey square tubing steel with a 7-inch by 1-inch thick steel pin, which is the same pins that are used on the hydraulic rams. And to pull the dragster up the ramp to the upper level, there is a 10,000lb electric winch that operates off the same 12-volts system as the rams do.

Since finishing the trailer over the Christmas and New Year’s break, Fleetwood has made a couple of test runs with the trailer fully loaded and trailing behind his motorhome.

“It towed nice fully loaded on test runs,” Fleetwood tells us. “I’m planning on weighing the whole thing as-loaded.”

And fully loaded it will be, as Fleetwood’s 1972 Chevelle that he currently races, with its 468 cubic inch big-block engine likely weighs close to 3,700 pounds. The dragster, which measures about 22 feet in length, probably weighs less than half of that. The upper deck sits 64 inches above the main trailer, and the loaded trailer tops out at 13-foot tall to the top of the dragster’s wing.

“I wouldn’t be afraid to do it again,” Fleetwood says. “I questioned a lot because I didn’t know anything about hydraulics, but that wasn’t too hard to figure out. All said and done, I’m at $13,200, including cabinets, tool boxes, and things like that. I’m trying to make it somewhat of an enclosed trailer.”

Fleetwood’s open stacker trailer has gotten him some attention, with some interested in having one of their own, but he’s not ready or willing to go into business building them. With his daughter racing in Super Pro and he himself competing in Sportsman or Pro classes, the Fleetwood Racing team will already have their hands full.