Trucks Are For Girls Too! Trisha Finke’s 800+hp Daily Driver Dodge

While most 20-something women may be more than content driving their Honda Civic or Toyota Prius econoboxes from mall to mall, Trisha Finke is not your typical young woman: the 22-year old co-owner of B-Town Diesel in Burlington, Kentucky, drives something much more impressive—she drives this 2006 Dodge Ram 2500 that puts down more than 800-horsepower to the rear wheels!

“… the beast within this beauty: the 5.9L Cummins engine has put down 824-horsepower and 1,613 lbs-ft of torque…”

Finke has had a passion for diesel trucks for more than five years and has owned two other diesel trucks—an ’04 LB7 Duramax and an ’03 Cummins—before her ’06 Dodge.

SUSPENSION

The clean, four-door Dodge has a leveling kit that works well with the LT325/50R20 Mickey Thompson Baja ATZ tires wrapped around 20X10-inch BMF Novakane wheels. To keep the rear tires planted, and to prevent the rear axle from trying to twist out from under the chassis, Finke’s fiancé and B-Town Diesel co-owner, Patrick Rector, fabricated a set of 6-foot traction bars for the truck that link the axle tubes to the frame. Both front and rear axle housings use 4.10 gears to spin the wheels and keep the 5.9L Cummins engine in its optimum RPM range.

LOOKIN’ GOOD

To dress up the outside of the truck, Finke opted to use a steel 2-inch cowl-induction hood, with a paint-matched grille shell and a billet grille insert. The grille shell is framed by a set of headlights that have been treated to a color-matched interior and utilizes 8,000 K HID lights from AllHIDs. Recon-smoked cab and taillights work with the 90 percent window tint to complete the dark-and-ominous look of the truck’s exterior. A Laramie front bumper gives the front end a good look without going to something exotic, while chrome rocker panels extend the chrome accent from the bumper, across the bottom of the truck, to the factory chrome rear bumper.

The Dodge tow-mirrors were painted to match along with the door handles to give the truck a visual upgrade over the cheap, plastic look of the original factory parts. Finke handled all of the paint match work herself.

INTERIOR WORK

Inside the truck, you’ll find a clean, grey, cloth interior, perfect for daily driving or blasting down the track on weekends. To help Finke keep an eye on the truck’s vital stats, she added an A-pillar pod to house a pair of Auto Meter factory match gauges in order to monitor boost and EGT. Then, to compliment the Auto Meter gauges, she installed an Edge CTS, mounting it on the windshield near the rear view mirror.

CUMMINS 5.9L

Lifting the cowl hood reveals the beast within this beauty: the 5.9L Cummins engine has put down 824-horsepower and 1,613 lbs-ft of torque on a chassis dyno to provide plenty of motivation for the big Dodge truck. The Cummins block and rotating assembly remain stock, as does the camshaft, but the cam actuates a set of Hamilton billet pushrods and Hamilton springs to control the valves accurately and prevent valve float. A set of ARP head studs clamp the stock head to the block in order to keep the cylinder pressure inside the engine where it belongs.

Spent gases are expelled through a 2nd Gen-style center-exit Steed Speed exhaust manifold, a Fleece Performance Engineering Billet S468 turbocharger and a 4-inch diameter MBRP exhaust system that terminates in the stock location with a 7-inch diameter polished stainless tip. Plenty of clean air is sucked into the S468 turbo through the aFe Pro Dry air filter and Fleece Performance Engineering ManTake, which has been painted bright purple to give the engine bay a feminine touch.

Once the intake charge is compressed by the turbo, it is sent to the factory intercooler through purple boost tubes and on to a Wilson Manifolds intake, where it’s sent into the cylinder head. An AirDog II 165 fuel pump/filter system sends #2 fuel from the tank to the Fleece PowerFlo 750 10mm-stroker CP3 high-pressure fuel pump. Then the high-pressure fuel is sent along to a set of Exergy 100 percent over Bosch fuel injectors to deliver massive amounts of fuel into the cylinders. The engine is controlled through the factory ECU with EFILive tuning by the team at Fleece Performance Engineering. She also painted both the valve cover and Wilson intake manifold purple, making the engine pop whenever she raises the hood.

TRANSMISSION

Finke loves to row her own gears: she had sled-pulling aspirations with her Dodge, so she purchased this one with the G56 six-speed manual transmission. Knowing that the stock clutch would not hold up to the truck’s power potential, especially in competition, she opted to go with a South Bend Clutch DDC3600 Competition Dual Disc clutch setup and upgraded hydraulics to actuate the pressure plate.

“The Fleece Performance Engineering ManTake has been painted bright purple to give the engine bay a feminine touch.”

MOVING ON

While the Dodge helped Finke realize her dream of owning an 800-horsepower daily driver, just before press time she let us know that she has sold the truck. She is dealing with pain associated with a 2013 car accident and decided that living with a daily-driver manual transmission wasn’t the best for her back; she has since purchased a truck with an automatic.

Her new truck is a 2004 Chevy 2500 crew cab that is currently under the knife at Fleece, getting the bottom end of the LLY Duramax built to meet her goal of having a 1,200-horsepower Duramax. We look forward to seeing it on the road and on the track soon. DW