White Knight

Standing Tall on Cody Gill’s 2016 Ford F-450 Platinum

- Ryan Lee Price

At the intersection of Interstate 20 and Highway 338 that runs an oval around Odessa, Texas, a sprawling town of 160,000 surrounded by the arid deserts of the Texas panhandle, is a relatively new gray block building with an expansive concrete parking lot laid before its five red-trimmed bays. Nationally, the city takes pride that Odessa is the birthplace of famed Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, while locally, Odessa is known for its population of jackrabbits—so much so that it is the city’s mascot—and Mathew Hoerauf and his crew at Select Off-Road, a haven for everything “you need to command the roadway, whether it be the highway, the dirt road to the jobsite or the original path you carve out with style and attitude.”

Cars have been a passion for Cody Gill since he was a kid. Behind the garage doors of his home hides some old American metal, and his previous build was a none-too-stealthy 650-horsepower 2015 Dodge Viper.

He has been friends with Hoerauf for years. “He and his crew at Select Off-Road have built a couple of cars for me in the past,” Gill recalls. “That’s when we started talking about the SEMA show, and I have always wanted to build a truck for SEMA.”

Fast forward a year or so, and Hoerauf approaches Gill with a rendering of his F-450, designed by Hoerauf and plotted by Robbie Bryant at KEG Media in Fort Smith, Arkansas. After seeing the KEG Media treatment, Gill was very impressed with the design and gave the project the green light. “When we originally started talking about building the truck, I had some ideas I wanted to see on it,” Gill says. “And when Mat and the guys at Select Off-Road started building it, they added their touches to it and really brought it all to life.”