Celebrity Drive: Discovery’s Street Outlaws Sean “Farmtruck” Whitley

Quick Stats: Sean “Farmtruck” Whitley, Discovery’s Street Outlaws
Daily Driver: 2006 GMC Duramax (Farmtruck’s rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: Oklahoma City to Fontana, CA
Car he learned to drive in: 1974 Dodge Dart
First car bought: 1970 Ford F-250 Camper Special

Being on one of Discovery’s top car shows Street Outlaws means Sean “Farmtruck” Whitley can buy or create any car he can think of for his daily driver. Although he and partner AZN race the inconspicuous but fast 1970 C-10 Chevy pickup that’s called the Farmtruck, his own daily ride is a 2006 GMC Duramax diesel.

“It’s just a regular old truck that I’ve been driving for 10 years or more. I love it,” Farmtruck says. “It’s not much, but it gets us down the road.”

He rates it a perfect 10. “There’s no dislikes at all whatsoever. The likes: it’s four-wheel drive, it’s powerful, it’s comfortable, I can haul stuff in it, it’s a very user-friendly vehicle, it’s an amazing vehicle, just because of the power, the comfort, it’s a Farmtruck Cadillac is what it is. Not to mention that it’s probably more a sleeper than the Farmtruck. It runs good. Do you want to come to Oklahoma with your truck and find out? That’s a call out.”

Fans of Street Outlaws have seen Farmtruck’s daily driver on the show. “Whenever we have to drive 50 or 100 miles out of town, we won’t drive the Farmtruck just because fuel’s so expensive,” he says. “We’ll load it up on a trailer, and we’ll take the D.”

The duo seem to like naming their vehicles, so this one is “D” for Duramax. “We’ve raced it once,” Farmtruck says.

Car he learned to drive in

Farmtruck learned to drive in his mom’s four-door 1974 Dodge Dart with a slant-six engine named Betsy.

“It was just a good old car that never broke, and it was dependable. Old Betsy,” he says. “As soon as I got behind the wheel and out of eye sight of the house, I turned it into a race car, even though it was a slant-six. My mom taught me by grabbing my pant leg and pulling my leg off the accelerator because she thought I was going too fast.”

At the same time he was learning to drive the Dart, Farmtruck started driving his dad’s old Ford pickup ,and it was what put him on the path he is on now car-wise.

“I was learning to drive a standard three on the tree ’73 Ford pickup, which would do a hell of a burn out in second gear—that’s what happened as soon as I got around the corner,” Farmtruck says. “Nah, it was a slant-six, it wouldn’t even do a burn out. Needless to say, I was excited to get behind the wheel of the truck. That’s what turned me into a truck guy.”

Farmtruck practiced driving around Oklahoma City streets. “Hey, just because we’re from Oklahoma don’t mean we kick turds around all the time,” he says. “We have city streets around here. It’s suburbia more or less. I started off on residential streets and then it didn’t take me long to get on the highway to see how fast it would go.”

He also grew up about a half mile away from the iconic Route 66. “It was a rural area out there between the town called Bethany and Yukon,” Farmtruck says. “There was not much going on out there, and that was my first time to take a car out and go 100 miles an hour in it on Route 66. We knew where to go to stretch a car out. You don’t want to do that in traffic and stop lights. We went out in the middle of nowhere. Even when we were kids, we knew what to do.”

First car bought

“The first car I ever bought was a truck, I went right into the truck world,” Farmtruck says. “It was a 1970 Ford ¾ ton F-250 Camper Special, the same year as the Farmtruck.”

Farmtruck had money from his work-study program in high school. He worked at a foundry where they made manhole covers, fire hydrants, and different castings. He went to school until noon and then going to work until 5 p.m. He was also a janitor, cleaning, taking the garbage out, and hauling items away.

“It was just an old farm truck,” he says. “It was a crappy truck, but it was the world to me. I loved it and it was all I could afford,” Farmtruck says. “I couldn’t afford to fix it up and do anything to it because I was always fixing things that went wrong and trying to keep it on the road. It needed brakes, it needed carburetor work, it needed motor work, so it was a constant battle and constantly pouring money into it to keep it on the road.”

The Ford then sat around for a long time and eventually he got rid of it. “I couldn’t afford a new block for it, it had a cracked block,” he says. “I just couldn’t afford to fix it, and someone came along and offered me some money for it. I needed it at the time, and I sold it.”

Favorite road trip

Farmtruck’s favorite road trip was the recent one he and AZN took from Oklahoma City to go to the recent Mega Race in Fontana, where they competed against former fellow channel star and Celeb Drive Aaron Kaufman. The episode aired in March on Discovery.

“What made it fun was that AZN and I went together, we built a car, we teamed up with our friends, we built a 1976 TransAm, and we got to go out there and race it,” he says. “We got to build a car in three and half weeks, and we just had a lot of fun.”

Discovery’s Street Outlaws

Sometimes a chance meeting can change the course of someone’s life. Farmtruck met AZN serendipitously at a street race while he drove the Farmtruck and AZN raced his Chevy II Nova.

“After we raced, we pulled over and started talking about the race,” he says. “We just started laughing, both of us started cracking jokes and there was some sort of energy between us. There’s 20 years age between us also, but there was just something that we just laughed a lot. And we knew immediately that we were going to be best friends.”

That initial meeting created a great friendship between the two, but it would be years before Street Outlaws.

“It was a dream that we never had,” Farmtruck says of the show. “AZN called me up one day and said, ‘You’re an internet sensation.’ And I was like, ‘What’s the Internet sensation thing?’ He said, ‘It’s on the computer. It’s a Youtube thing. Everyone loves the Farmtruck.’ I guess there’s a lot of scouts that watch out for videos and cool stuff that’s on the internet. There were also a lot of other cool cars on the internet from the 405, Oklahoma City here. There was the Murder Nova, there was great footage of that. I guess somebody wanted to do a show about street racing, they got a hold of us, and that’s exactly what they got—a show about street racing because that’s what we do.”

The partnership and chemistry hasn’t faded between the Oklahoma duo since the show, either. They always tries to make each other laugh.

Farmtruck joked they don’t get noticed much since being on one of Discovery’s top shows. “It hasn’t happened yet, we haven’t been recognized yet, but we’re excited for the day we do get recognized in public.”

Season 9 just ended last week, and it will be reruns until Season 10. Farmtruck says they’re not sure what each season will be like while they’re filming it. “We’re fortunate that the seasons that we’ve had in the past, that the viewers have liked it,” he says. “We’re never cocky about any season that we do. We’re just going to give it everything that we got and hopefully the fans will like it.”

READ MORE CELEBRITY DRIVES HERE:

• Singer-Songwriter, Actor Iggy Pop
• Grammy-Nominated Country Star Hunter Hayes
• Peter Frampton
• Of Street Outlaws Jeff “AZN” Bonnett

The post Celebrity Drive: Discovery’s Street Outlaws Sean “Farmtruck” Whitley appeared first on Motor Trend.

from Motor Trend http://ift.tt/2sjubo8