King Shocks Co-Founder Ross King Is Building a 1,000-HP El Camino That's Half Donk, Half Trophy Truck

Most high-riser builds go tall and stay there. Ross King's 1972 El Camino is going tall, wide and, eventually, off the pavement. The co-founder of King Shocks wanted a donk-style Elky with real long-travel suspension, and HOT ROD caught it in the middle of the job at Old Anvil Speed this spring, with foam bucks taped to the fenders and a 1,000-hp engine waiting.

King knows suspension from the welding table up. HOT ROD reports he co-founded King Shocks in 1996 with his brother Brett and his dad, Lance, and started out as the company's lead welder and fabricator. One day he had what the magazine called a wild idea: a King-equipped El Camino donk.

Version one: pink wheels and air bags

The first version kept the stock GM chassis. King adapted a set of Funco Motorsports long-travel shocks, built by King, plus an air bag system to get enough clearance for big wheels. It rolled on 24-inch hot pink wheels with rubber-band tires and kept a basic Chevy small-block under the hood. HOT ROD says King liked the result but wanted to take it further, so he started talking with Paul Bosserman at Old Anvil Speed.

Roadster Shop bones, trophy truck travel

Step one was getting rid of the modified stock frame, which had been living in the back room at King's facility in Garden Grove, California. Old Anvil started with a Roadster Shop Fast Track chassis. "They took a Roadster Shop chassis and cut away almost everything but the basic frame rails and body mounting locations," Bosserman told HOT ROD.

On those rails, the team fabricated a one-off long-travel suspension with 16 inches of travel up front and more than 20 inches in the rear, according to Bosserman, and beefed up the structure so it could take real off-road abuse. That is the part that separates this car from every other donk on 26s. HOT ROD says the plan is to take it off-road for real, and the photos show the hardware to back that up: a tall, King-fabricated rear shock tower and gusseting through the chassis.

Going wide on purpose

King also wanted the wheels wider, not just taller. Rather than pull the wheels in toward the centerline, Bosserman decided to widebody the El Camino so the 26-inch Intro wheels could compress under full travel without hitting sheetmetal. The front fenders were opened up first, since the fronts also need room to compress while turned. Then the cutting wheel went to the rear quarters.

To find the new shapes, Old Anvil worked in foam. HOT ROD says Bosserman used foam to form the outer lines of the new rear quarter, the same basic idea as the clay that factory designers use, because it is cheap to fix if you get it wrong. After a lot of trial and error, the shape was transferred into steel by hand, with plenty of math, an English wheel and a forest of Cleco fasteners holding panels in place before welding. The fronts got the same foam treatment.

A Whipple-fed Wegner LS3

Fast donks need big power, and HOT ROD noted that plenty of donks, boxes and bubbles run in the 9s or quicker. For the Elky, King ordered a Wegner Performance LS3 with forged internals topped by a 2.9-liter Whipple supercharger, rated by Wegner at more than 1,000 horsepower. A Culhane 4L80E transmission will back it.

Where it stands

When HOT ROD published its update in late April, the passenger side of the widebody was done in steel and the team planned to mirror it on the driver side. Old Anvil still had plenty of fabrication to go before paint, wiring and the rest, and the magazine promised another look once it got closer to finished. We have not seen a finished car reported since then, so treat everything here as a build in progress.

Donk by attitude, not by rulebook

HOT ROD was upfront that the word donk is a stretch here. By the strict definition, a donk is a 1971 to 1976 Caprice or Impala, a box is a 1977 to 1990 model and a bubble is a 1991 to 1996 model. The magazine traces the style to South Florida's hip-hop scene in the early 1990s and says plenty of other cars now get built the same way. An El Camino shares its bones with the Chevelle, not the Caprice, so this one is a high-riser in donk clothing.

What makes it interesting is the collision of scenes. Big-wheel cars are usually built for the street, the show and the eighth-mile. Trophy trucks are built for whoops at 100 mph. King's El Camino is trying to do the stance of one with the suspension travel of the other, and it is being built by people who make long-travel shocks for a living. HOT ROD put it plainly: love it or hate it, you will not be able to ignore it.