In early May, former DI contributor Craig Cook sat down four of the original Street Outlaws cast members for a roundtable interview at Mo-Kan Dragway’s inaugural 405 Shootout. Cook spoke with James “Doc” Love, Joe “Dominator” Woods, Sean “Farmtruck” Whitley, Jeff “AZN” Bonnett to discuss the early days of the show, how it evolved over time, and what the future holds after 15 seasons of the original show and numerous spinoffs.
At the time, many of the drivers were at a crossroads: with no television deal in place and fewer contracts being offered, they had to decide how to proceed moving forward. Since then, Speed Promotions Racing, which took over the No Prep Kings framework, canceled the final races of its 2025 season, effectively ending the Street Outlaws era.
This excerpt of the roundtable, which appeared in DI #196, the State of Drag Issue, in September/October 2025, features Sean “Farmtruck” Whitley.
Looking back on when the original 405 show first started, did you ever believe it would blow up and become as popular as it did?
Oh no, we definitely thought they were cops. We thought it was a sting operation. And whenever they sent the guys out to film the sizzle reel, I thought, “They’re going to film us racing each other for how long? Eight weeks?” I thought they’d never air a single episode. The first season was eight episodes, and I really thought we weren’t going to make it out of our first season. For it to go 12 years, and we’re still recognizable, that blows me away. Everyone recognizes the truck. That’s just an old crappy truck that we built in my garage. We worked on it on weekends and started racing it, brought it out of town and it was a great sleeper, it worked. But yeah, I’m still blown away that we can go to a track and have a line.
You all have done this for quite a while now. Looking back on the show, what’s either a favorite memory or accomplishment that each of you had over the course of Street Outlaws?
Talking about memories and favorite moments…my favorite moment is when we built the Dung Beetle, and AZN got behind the wheel. He had to row gears, and he showed them all how it was done. It was the only stick-shift car out there and he did pretty damn good, outrun a bunch of supercars with it. Even though we’re not related, he’s 20 years younger than me and it was like watching my boy. We built the car, we raced the car, and that’s one of my fondest memories.
As things progressed, it wasn’t just the 405 show anymore. With nearly 20 spin-off shows, you were basically filming year-round. With a cast made up primarily of regular, blue-collar workers, how did you balance your regular jobs and filming full-time?
Well, first of all, you mentioned spin-off shows. I think we, or Street Outlaws, set a record for the most spin-off shows in any reality TV show series. We’re proud of that.
One of the most popular spin-off shows was No Prep Kings. How did you all balance the idea of being street racers that are now competing at the track, but also giving fans of the show the opportunity to come out and experience what you’re doing?
Well, a little bit of the history of the show and how it evolved. Every human wants a nicer home and a nicer car. Same thing with racers – they want to go faster. We had run out of real street racers on Street Outlaws to race and the producers started finding us races, and that’s when you saw Pro Mods show up. All the other guys said, “Hey, we’re in front of the world here. We got to step up our game. If we’re going to be racing Pro Mods on the street, we got to do this.” They did what they had to do to compete.
AZN and I, we knew we couldn’t compete. We just wanted to keep it simple. So we still have the same old Farmtruck. We put a bigger and better motor in it, but it’s still streetable, and it’s still what we wanted the show to be. Our last season, we were driving street cars, we were cruising, we were getting back to our roots. Everybody was having fun, no one was arguing. We were racing in other towns, other states. That was the best the show had been in a long, long time.
With the evolution you talked about – the never-ending desire to continue going faster combined with big-money teams jumping in – do you believe it eventually went too far from what made it popular to begin with?
Well, it’s gone too far for us, but not for them. They did it, and I’m glad they stepped up and built these awesome cars to compete. People evolved and they got better at what they do. AZN and I, we’re still stuck in the past.
Looking ahead, with Speed Promotions Racing taking over what was formerly No Prep Kings, and no television show currently in place, what are your plans moving forward? Will you continue with SPR, or focus more on match races and paid appearances?
No, we want to do what we want to do. We want to build cool stuff. We just got done with our “Funny Farm,” which is like a double truck, with two front ends. And we want to have a lot of fun creating stuff like that. We want to come to these tracks, do some grudge racing. We don’t do much street stuff anymore. A lot of these small towns will block off the roads and let us race. We love that stuff.
We’ve been invited to go out and race with the other guys [SPR], but we didn’t hear from them in a long time and so we booked the whole year, and we really don’t have it in our schedule to go this year. We love doing stuff like this at small tracks like Mo-Kan. There’s lots of friendly people, a lot of hardcore Street Outlaws fans that come out to see us.
The post DI Interview: Sean ‘Farmtruck’ Whitley on The Heart of ‘Street Outlaws’ & Getting Back to His Roots first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
