Diesel of the Week is presented by
It’s usually pretty easy to tell the difference between a truck built for racing and a truck build for shows, but every so often, we find one that can fit into both categories. While walking through the endless rows of trucks at UCC, we ran into Brett Deutsch and checked out his truck and perfectly blends power and classiness.
The 1969 Chevy C10 in question is a looker; it’s shiny black paint job and meticulously crafted body make it hard to believe that the truck is over 50 years old. Deutsch’s grandfather gave it to him when he was only 15, and at the time, the truck had a 3-53 Detroit Diesel engine in it. Although the trusty engine was a classic, Deutsch decided to upgrade after a full-body makeover.
The first thing to go in was a 383 stroker engine, but after a few years, he wanted to go bigger. At the age of two, Deutsch’s father started Deutsch’s Truck and Diesel Repair, the shop that would surround him for most of his life. Naturally, this engrained a love for diesel engines that would lead him to put a Duramax LLY under the hood of his Chevy and build it into a crazy fast race truck.
“In the eighth-mile we’ve done 4.61-seconds at 155 mph,” Deutsch said. “And in the quarter mile last year, I let out at the 1,000-ft mark because the truck was starting to go left, we ran 7.28-second at 175 mph.”
The build started with a stock LLY block, but Deutsch found that at 1,000 horsepower the engine was starting to have cylinder warpage issues. On the next attempt the block was half-filled with concrete, but that just led to cracking at the concrete line when the team began bumping up the power.
Eventually, Deutsch decided to completely fill the block with concrete and add solid aluminum Wagler heads to the cylinders, so that there’s no water in the heads or anywhere else in the truck. Everything is solid filled.
One of the biggest changes from the earlier build to what the engine is now is the turbo setup.
“The last build was a triple turbo, and we’ve saved close to 200 pounds going from that to the single turbo we have now. I was running about 150lbs. of boost before and now with the big single we’re getting around 90.”
Although the 102mm Precision Turbo ProMod delivers less boosts, Deutsch makes up for it with nitrous. With the four-stage Nitrous Outlet setup he added, Deutsch estimates he’s injecting about 850 horsepower during a run.
The engine also features a Callies billet crank with Wagler connecting rods and Ross forged pistons.
All in all, this Duramax engine makes close to 2,200 horsepower – and near 3,000 if you add in the nitrous. The 7.28-second quarter mile Deutsch hit last year cemented his name in the history books as having the fastest diesel-powered Pro Stock truck on the quarter mile.
Even more impressive, this record comes six years after he completed the same feat with a time of 8.47 seconds in 2015. The previous run ended with a fuel line fire destroying much of the truck, which prompted Deutsch to rebuild the engine and truck and smash his own record my more than a second in 2021.
Diesel of the Week is sponsored by AMSOIL. If you have an engine you’d like to highlight in this series, please email Engine Builder Editor Greg Jones at [email protected].
