Hydrodynamic dynamometers can be used for the entire range of combustion engines from cart engines up to large ship engines, are inexpensive and have a small moment of inertia, but still they are rarely used for dynamic tests due to their strong nonlinearities. No precise models are available as well. Against this background, this paper proposes an inverse control of an approximate form determined experimentally. As the paper shows using measurements on a dynamic truck engine test bench, the proposed approach is able to offer a significantly better performance with respect to the classical implementation thus opening a new path for the intended use for dynamic testing.