AS SEEN IN OUR DIESEL WORLD SEPTEMBER 2026 ISSUE – Buy Now!

A Five-Second Street Truck with a Full Interior

Trent Owen’s 2007 Cummins was supposed to be a clean, consistent 6.70 street truck, the kind of setup that could take a beating at the track and still drive home without turning every pass into a recovery mission. That was the plan, anyway, but Dadbod had other ideas, and if you know Trent, that tracks. The truck’s evolution has followed the same pattern as the guy behind it: calculated, stubborn, funny when it probably shouldn’t be, and driven far past the point where most people would have called it good.

Before Dadbod, Trent already had a truck that worked. His 2006 Ram was a 7.70 setup that handled towing and racing, but eventually it reached the edge of what that combination could reasonably do. Moving forward meant starting over from the ground up, so Trent went looking for a cleaner foundation. The 2007 Laramie he found had a handful of tasteful mods, but most of that disappeared once he got it home. From that point on, the truck was treated less like a pickup and more like a blank canvas with a target on its back.

The first version came together quickly by race truck standards, mostly during whatever free time Trent had outside of work. The goal was a stock bottom end 5.9 street truck that could run 6.70s consistently. It had 250-percent Exergy injectors, dual stock pumps, and a 76/96 single charger, which was a serious setup for a 5.9 street truck at the time. The first outing, it went 6.78, which was pretty damn impressive. That could have been enough, but if you know Trent, you know better. The truck had done exactly what it was built to do, which is usually when a normal person enjoys the thing and stops making their life harder.

Trent is not that kind of normal. He’s the kind of guy who hears “you can’t do that” and files it away as a personal invitation. He’s also the kind of guy who will help another racer any time they ask, answer questions about trucks and build details, share what he has learned over the years, and give credit to everyone around him before he ever starts talking himself up. That combination matters here. Dadbod is fast because Trent is sharp, but it works because he is patient, methodical, and willing to do the ugly work nobody sees.

As the truck evolved, the parts changed to match the way Trent and the crew at TRE Performance Transmissions and Melting Pistons Race Parts actually build for customers. He wanted the truck to represent the products and combinations he believes in, not just a pile of parts that happened to work once. The current engine is an in-house 5.9 build with Wagler Street Fighter rods, coated pistons, a Hamilton cam, and mild headwork. It is not exotic just for the sake of sounding expensive but rather built around a combination that has been thought through, used hard, and refined.

Air comes from a VSRacing GT50 88 mm mounted on a Ronin T6 dual-gated nickel-plated manifold with dual Black Sheep Industries gates and custom corkscrew dumps. The piping was built in-house, feeding through an On3 intercooler. Fuel comes from Flux 300s, an S&S 14 mm high-speed pump, and an AirDog 220. There is also a single NX 375 solenoid with a purge solenoid that can double as a spool jet or scramble when needed. In plain English, it is a simple-looking setup that’s only simple if you ignore the years of experience behind it.

That combination has pushed Dadbod to a 5.94 at 121 mph on a single kit and then driven home afterward. That last part is important. Plenty of trucks can be made fast for one clean pass. Fewer can be built to repeat, survive, and still feel like a street truck when the night is over. Dadbod has spent time on the knife’s edge of performance, but Trent has since dialed it back into a consistent 6.70 setup so it can live, race, attend events, and serve as a real-world test mule instead of a grenade with nice paint.

The transmission is a major reason the truck has stayed alive. Built in-house at TRE, the Comp 48 setup uses a Santjer solid input shaft, billet intermediate, oversized output, DPC triple-disc converter, billet flexplate, and a Muldoon constant pressure transbrake valve body. The truck has more than 300 passes on the transmission, with the intermediate shaft being the only notable casualty after all that time. In this world, that’s less of a failure and more of a receipt for proper use. The Santjer input, one of the early shafts sold to the public, is still hanging in there, which Trent is probably just a little too proud of.

Visually, Dadbod works because it doesn’t try to explain itself too hard. The factory PR4 paint, otherwise known as Flame Red, is still there, the stance is right, and the truck carries itself like something built by someone who knows restraint is not the same as boring. The 6.7 Power Stroke valance up front was added before that look became common, inspired by JP Libert’s truck and the idea of using it as an air dam to keep air from packing under the truck at speed. There was no wind tunnel testing and no spreadsheet, just a practical idea that stuck.

The bumper brackets have their own story. Trent originally built the first set of “pro mod” brackets because the bumper sat too low to get the truck on the trailer. They were never meant to become a product for sale. They were just a fix for his own problem, which is usually how the best parts are born. Now they’re one of the shop’s biggest sellers, because apparently other people also enjoy loading their trucks without inventing new swear words.

Inside, the truck is still very much a Laramie. Heated seats, radio, HVAC controls, power sliding rear glass, and the factory comfort pieces are all still part of it. The hitch is gone, and the A/C compressor was removed because Trent thinks it ruins the engine bay, which is both ridiculous and completely on-brand for him. Beyond that, Dadbod has not been gutted into something that only pretends to be streetable. It still carries the feel of a real truck, just one that can make people at the track reassess their life choices.

The human side of the build is what gives this one weight, though. Trent is a co-owner at TRE and also works as a machinist at Nucor Steel, so free time is not exactly lying around in piles. The current version of the truck took longer because life got busier, the shop grew, and personal projects started getting squeezed between customer work, family, and everything else. All that aside, he still finished it. Not because it was easy, but because quitting doesn’t seem to be one of his factory options.

If you ask Trent what made it all worth it, he’ll tell you the five-second pass is part of the answer, but not the whole thing. He gets just as much satisfaction from the conversations that the truck brings out. The people at shows who ask what the engine was swapped out of. The people who don’t know diesel motorsports until they see Dadbod make a pass and suddenly start paying attention. The folks who have followed the truck online for years and finally get to see it in person. That stuff matters to him, because the truck has become bigger than a time slip.

It also paid for itself the hard way. During the first few years, Trent raced every event he could reasonably make and used the winnings to pay off the truck. You won’t find that kind of detail on a spec sheet, but it says a lot about both the truck and the person driving it. Dadbod was not built to sit under lights. It was built to work, race, earn, and prove a point, and it did just that.

None of it happened alone, and Trent would be the first to say that. His wife, the crew at TRE Performance Transmissions and Melting Pistons Race Parts, Matt Santjer at Santjer Performance Development, and Don and April at Flux Diesel Injection are all part of the story. The truck has become a product of those relationships as much as the parts themselves. Good people matter when a build gets this serious, and Trent has built his program around people he trusts.

Dadbod is in a settled place now, at least by Trent’s definition of settled, which probably means something different than it does for the rest of us. A removable roll cage is being added for ODSS events, and the truck will continue to see transmission testing and refinement. The core of it, though, is exactly what it needs to be: clean, fast, consistent, and still true to the original idea of a street truck.

Dadbod stands out because it reflects the guy behind it. Smart without being flashy. Funny without needing a spotlight. Competitive without losing the willingness to help the next person in line. Dadbod is proof that a build can be serious without being soulless, fast without being fragile, and clean without becoming another trend-chasing clone.

That’s the difference with this one. The number gets people’s attention. Trent’s way of doing things is what makes them remember who he is, what he does, and, most importantly, why he does it.