Laying The Foundation
The truck was an extended cab, and Dillon decided that he wanted it to be faster, so one easy way to get lighter was to get rid of the extra cab space and move to a regular cab pickup. He stuck with a 2003, reduced the extended cab truck back to stock, and put the engine and transmission into the regular cab. “At this point I wanted 10’s. Mid 11’s weren’t enough anymore! So I added a triple CP3 kit with stock pumps for reliability, dual FASS titanium 150 lift pumps, upped the injector size to Industrial Injection 250 percent overs, and replaced the s483 atmosphere turbo with an sxe591.”
The engine is currently equipped with Carrillo rods, Mahle Motorsport pistons, a stage 2 cam, fully race ported heads, an Industrial Injection girdle kit, PPE manifolds and up-pipes, and ARP head studs. He even built all the piping himself and added a Mishimoto intercooler.
As for the transmission, he started with a PPE stage 5 kit. Dillon says, “They released their stage 6 kit. As I was upping the horsepower, I felt it would be a good idea to go that route. I had issues with it burning up c2 multiple times. Now it’s to a point that it’s a kit made up of various parts, not a kit that can be bought. But it works! At one point I broke a stator in a converter by doing 4-wheel launches, so now it’s to a billet stator Goerend triple-disc converter that’s been holding.