Trad Ronfeldt has a wealth of experience building vehicles for “go” more than “show.” As the owner of Team Racing And Development, he’s the crew chief of Kyle LeDuc’s championship winning #99 Pro-4 truck and the Chip Ganassi #99 Extreme E truck. But with an eye for old cars and the skill to make it happen, Trad was ready to switch it up with a street build. The side of that #99 truck is where you’ll find the first step in the story of how he went from working on race winning off-road trucks to building a SEMA-star restomod that wears a WD-40 logo.
WD-40’s sponsorship of the #99 put Trad’s skills on their radar. When they asked him what he would build he sent them a rendering of a 1947-1951 Chevy truck and the concept won them over. The premise of the build was a vehicle that could have been in the WD-40 fleet since the formula was developed in the early ‘50s.
The WD-40 Chevy was built to look like an old survivor work truck with the occasional hotrod upgrade, like many old shop trucks of the day have seen.
Trad started the search for a suitable truck and turned up an old Bell telephone service truck with a utility body. Even though rust prevented it from being a good candidate he sent it to the WD-40 team and they fell in love with the utility box; a unique look and a perfect platform to showcase and sell their product. He soon found the right truck just a few hours away - a clean 1951 - and the direction of the build was coming together.
Like so many timeless builds, Trad had to work doubly hard to make the Chevy look like a simple survivor. There was no utility box that fit the narrow and vintage lines of the truck so he framed one out from scratch with box tube. The stock stepside fenders were remounted to the wider body, leaving room for dually wheels and tires. Even the factory running boards found their way back home but now on opposite sides to match the extra width at the rear end. The truck was beginning to look like it spent the ‘50s and ‘60s hauling loads of WD-40 around to parts stores and garages!
A former Bell utility truck provided the inspiration for the WD-40 Chevy's custom-built utility bed. The dually fenders are the original Stepside fenders mounted to the box walls, and the running boards are on opposite ends, allowing for a from-the-factory look.
The Champ Off Road series spends most of its schedule in Wisconsin, taking both Trad and the Chevy to the Midwest for a few months of the year. While he was racing, Trad enlisted his cousin Jesse Lewis at Christy Road Customs to help finish the metal work on the box, wrapping the frame in sheet metal panels with tool boxes and hardware. WD-40 got a neat little touch when they dimple dyed the inside of the tool box doors to make them perfect spray can shelves.
Paint was handled in Wisconsin as well. Recreating patina is top tier artistry but that’s exactly what Rocky at Airhead Designs does. Not only did he create the look of single stage paint that was first laid in the 1950s but even the texture feels rusty.
The interior got the same detailed paint motif but Trad didn't stop there. A bench seat and crank windows were period correct but a little updating was appropriate. While browsing for upholstery inspiration he stumbled upon the Etsy page for B62 Interiors, a shop out of Arizona that specializes in truck bench seats of the era. He set them off in the right direction with some pictures of distressed brown leather jackets and they ran with it, delivering a diamond-stitched bench seat with matching door cards and headliner. In front of the driver sits a Dakota Digital dash designed to bolt right into a Chevy Advanced-Design truck and look at home, backed by their RetroTech control box to modernize the rest of the truck’s wiring. On the slim chance that anyone could get tired of listening to side exit exhaust pipes Trad installed an MTX Audio system with a hidden controller in the ashtray.
