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Austin Denny is one of those guys who got bit by the diesel bug and never looked back. It all started back in high school when his parents bought a 6.0L Powerstroke-powered F-350 to pull the family camper around. It turns out that camper would soon be stationary in one spot, so the truck was given to Denny.
A new exhaust and tuner were quickly installed and Denny was encouraged by friends to hit the track. On his first test and tune night, he ran six passes and hit a 17-second quarter mile run. After that he was hooked.
“I kept building that truck for a while and eventually got it to the point that we were getting to that 11.49-12.0 seconds range and the local track told me I needed to put a cage in it,” Denny said. “I didn’t want to go that deep with it, so I just decided to buy a single cab truck.”
The 2006 F-250 XL that Denny has made a name for himself in the Outlaw Diesel Super Series (ODSS) was initially a Kansas State Highway truck that he had found on CarGurus.com. After calling the previous owner and hearing it run, he had it shipped home and got to work. Three days later and it was down to a bear frame.
Denny has been through a few different engine setups by this point, but the current 6.0L Powerstroke under the hood is performing just the way he needs it to. The long block came from Warren Diesel Injection, a name stay in the diesel performance world and expert in Powerstrokes.
The 14:1 compression 6.0L features a 0.040″ over engine block, a Stage 3 Colt Cams camshaft, River City Diesel pushrods, and a pair of heavily ported, cast, o-ringed cylinder heads from Warren Diesel. Eight forged MAHLE Motorsport pistons ride at the end of Wagler Competition Products connecting rods.
“The more and more power we’ve raised, we’ve found that it’s just easier to keep it simple,” Denny says. “Everybody’s got solid roller cams, and I just haven’t done it yet or had a need to. It’s still got the stock block, crank and girdle, and we put on the forged pistons since it was getting to the point where the cast pistons were going to crack.”
And so far, “simple” has worked incredibly well for Denny. He runs the truck in the 6.70 index class in the ODSS and finished in seventh place overall in 2019. In 2020, he first broke out into the 5-second zone, and in 2021, he hit a personal best time of 5.69 at 127.9 mph in the eighth-mile. Even more impressive is the fact that Denny is still utilizing the factory Ford chassis underneath, albeit with Firepunk Diesel’s four-link suspension kit and a set of AFCO Performance coilover shocks.
A big step was taken this year when the truck moved up to the Pro-Street level. Despite fighting some transmission issues and switching between a 4R and 5R, it hit an incredible 5.28 seconds when battling against Justin Ziegler’s powerful Cummins truck at the 2022 Scheid Diesel Extravaganza.
Helping the truck make an impressive 2,000 horsepower are more than efficient forced air and fueling setups. Denny is running huge Warren Diesel 500/400 injectors and a secondary high pressure oil pump system, also from Warren Diesel. The setup is completed by a small 1.5 gal. fuel cell that’s fed by an Aeromotive belt-driven mechanical lift pump.
For air, Denny compounded two Bullseye turbochargers – a 76/87 in the valley and a 94/104 atmospheric that hangs off the exhaust manifold. Paired with a water-to-air intercooler from CSR and a custom-built Nitrous Express system featuring three stages of nitrous, the setup produces 120-lbs. of boost.
“I’ve been going back and forth about putting a billet block in it, but this might be my last year running Pro-Street with it,” he says. “We’re currently putting a Pro-Mod together with Warren Diesel, so we’ll see where that goes.”
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].
