Ten Great Engines

***Ed Blown Vert*** · 09-29-2007, 06:50 AM

Ten Great Engines

When the hot rod was invented, one of the first steps in the process was to tear off the hood and throw it behind the barn. Easy and open access to the powerplant was required at all times. And of course there was also the need to show off the engine to everyone else on the street. It doesn't take a doctorate in psychology to figure this one out: Since day one, hot rodders have been all about engines and going fast.
With our roots firmly planted in horsepower, HOT ROD thought it was important to recognize some of the great engines in the history of hot rodding. What defines a great hot rod engine? Here are the criteria we used: First, it needs to contain American parts. Next, it must display the ingenuity and can-do attitude that we as Americans naturally take to be the American spirit. And except in the rarest circumstances, it really ought to be a V-8. So here are 10 of history's greatest hot rod engines. No doubt some readers will scream that we left their favorites off the list. We expect that, so if you're one of them, feel free to let us know who should have been included. Send e-mails to hotrod@primedia.com, and put "10 Great Engines" in the subject line.
Grumpy's Pro Stock Small-Block
In the '70s, Bill "Grumpy" Jenkins was the reigning guru of the small-block Chevy V-8 in drag racing. Racers hung on his every word; when his hood came off in the paddock a crowd formed. But there was no heads-up pro category for the small-block in NHRA until 1972, when the Pro Stock rules were rewritten to permit small-displacement engines in short-wheelbase cars, handing them a weight break against the Chrysler Hemis then stinking up the show. Spotting his opening, Jenkins waded in with Grumpy's Toy IX, a Vega hatchback sporting a 331ci small-block.
It may seem laughably primitive when you look it over today, but in 1972 Grumpy's engine combination was the absolute state of the art: Small-journal '62-'67 327 block, ported angle-plug heads made of cast iron, an Edelbrock TR1X tunnel ram with the top half of the plenum lopped off, and a pair of 660-cfm 4224 Holleys mounted crosswise on top. The pistons were TRW items with gas ports and hand-massaged domes. The camshaft was a General Kinetics 321/336 roller, while holding the valvetrain halfway together was a cruel device called a Jomar rocker stud girdle. Like a home-rolled cigarette, the engine may have looked loose at the ends, but it delivered the payload. Grumpy's deal made an honest 600 hp, a magical number for a small-block Chevy at the time.
At the season-opening Winternationals in Pomona, Grumpy's Toy IX qualified in the bottom half of the field with a 9.90. But by race day Jenkins had the new chassis dialed in and uncorked a string of 9.60s, mowing down five Mopar Hemis to win the eliminator. He took Pro Stock honors at six of the eight NHRA national events in 1972, and also won $35,000 at the Professional Racers Association meet in Tulsa. With his small-block Vega, Jenkins changed the face of Pro Stock. Chevy partisans still revere him for it, and the Hemi fans still haven't gotten over it.
Richard Petty's '64 Plymouth Race Hemi
Just so you know, maybe this is not the complete story of the debut of the Chrysler 426 Race Hemi at the '64 Daytona 500. Perhaps the focus has been held tight, avoiding certain aspects in order to protect the guilty, some of whom are still around. You know how it is: Nobody can prove anything. Suffice it to say that NASCAR got bushwhacked and blindsided and the Fords were blown into the weeds, as Paul Goldsmith qualified his Ray Nichels Plymouth on the pole at 174.91 mph. That was, oh, 14 mph faster than the previous year's pole speed. And on race day the Dodges and Plymouths swept the first three places, with Richard Petty leading 184 of 200 laps to win his first Daytona 500.
Development on the 426 Hemi-the engine that turned Bill France purple-had begun in earnest less than one year earlier. Based on the 426 RB Max Wedge design, the new block included an extra row of head bolts along the top of each bank to accept redesigned cylinder heads with mammoth ports and hemispherical combustion chambers. These heads were similar to the first-generation '51-'58 Mopar Hemiswith wide valve angles and double rocker shafts, but with some updated technology as well. The first complete engine was hand-assembled in the final week of November 1963. The new Hemi showed huge potential but also some problems, including cracked cylinder walls in the right bank of the block.
With February and the Daytona 500 rushing toward them, Chrysler engineers scrambled to correct the problems. A revised block casting was ready in late January, but the new pieces would not be finished in time for practice or qualifying, only for the race. The Dodges and Plymouths lapped at an easy 165 mph through much of the week, right on pace with the Fords. Not until qualifying did the Chrysler teams show their hands, as Dodges and Plymouths finished 1-2-3 in both 100-mile qualifying races for the 500. Each of these races was completed at an average of 170 mph, nearly 10 mph faster than the previous year's pole run. If they weren't quite sure about it before, now it was blatantly obvious: The Ford teams had been totally sandbagged.
And on race day, Richard Petty heeded the call to victory lane. Starting third, he led all but 16 laps and was well over one full lap ahead at the checkered flag. It was the first of seven Daytona 500 victories for Petty and one of nine NASCAR Grand National races he won in the '64 season on his way to his first of seven NASCAR championships. But oddly enough, at the start of the following year Petty was sitting on the sidelines. NASCAR had banned the Hemi from competition.
The Swamp Rat's 200-Mph 392 Hemi
Chris Karamesines was clocked at 204.54 mph at Alton, Illinois, in April 1960. In Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1962, Eddie Hill registered a 202.70-mph run. But nobody really and truly accepted that a dragster had run 200 mph in a quarter-mile until it was done in front of the NHRA clocks. That happened on August 1, 1964, when Don Garlits officially ran 201.34 mph at a points meet at Island Dragway in Great Meadows, New Jersey.
In these days of billet Fuel Hemis, the engine in Swamp Rat VI is jaw-slackening to behold. In 1964 racers couldn't just assemble parts off the rack; ad-hoc engineering and experimenting were required. Big's 200 motor was built around a cast-iron 392 Hemi block and heads, and except for a 0.030-inch overbore (total displacement 396 cubes) and a Champion Speed Shop main girdle, the block was stock. The crank was a Mopar piece as well, with center counterweights welded on. Rods and pistons were aluminum from Mickey Thompson, while the heads were treated to a standard port-and-polish job. It was all fairly standard stuff for the time.
It was in the details that all the thought and effort were revealed. The valvesprings were 409 Chevy, while the valves came from a secret source, carefully recontoured and resized to 2.075 inches on the intakes and 1.950 inches on the exhausts. The tuneup featured 11 percent blower overdrive, an 8.2:1 compression ratio, chilly N54 Champion plugs, and 32 degrees of spark lead to light the 90 percent nitro blend (5 percent benzol, 5 percent methanol). Garlits felt that controlling the heat in the supercharger was the key to getting this aggressive setup down the track, so he insisted on using brand-new 6-71 blowers straight from the GMC dealer, never used or rebuilt, which he then clearanced to his own fussy specs. It worked, and the 201 at Great Meadows was no fluke. He'd already run 200 at Detroit the week before. And like Babe Ruth calling his shot, Big Daddy then flatly announced he would win at Indy as well. That would be the first of his eight U.S. Nationals victories.
Ford's '67 Le Mans-Winning 427 V-8
Here's an odd little fact about the 427 Ford FE engine: With a bore of 4.23 inches and a stroke of 3.78 inches, its actual displacement was 424.9 ci. But Ford decided to call it a 427, maybe because that was the displacement limit then in effect in NASCAR and NHRA, where the big-block V-8 was designed to compete. Or maybe 427 just sounded cooler. But despite the 2.1ci shortfall, the 427 still made a great drag racing and stock car motor. And while it was not originally designed for the role, it made a good road racing engine too, in the Cobra and the Ford GT.
Ford's lead entries in the 24 Hours of Le Mans for 1967 were four new Mk. IV GTs, powered by a not-that-special version of the medium-riser 427. Aluminum heads brought down the weight to 580 pounds, but the side-oiler block, crank, connecting rods, and valvetrain were Dearborn production pieces. With dual-quad induction and a bundle-of-snakes exhaust system-the outer two cylinders on one bank shared their collector with the inner two cylinders on the opposite bank to produce 180-degree scavenging-the 427 produced around 500 hp at 6,400 rpm. This "lazy liters" strategy was thrown against Ferrari's highly strung twin-cam 12.
Observers assumed that codrivers A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney, at that moment America's two greatest drivers, were Ford's designated rabbits. But that wasn't their plan; they kept a disciplined pace and never put a wheel wrong. As the other Fords stumbled, Gurney and Foyt completed the 24 Hours five laps ahead of the closest Ferrari. The car also won the Index of Efficiency, a special Le Mans award for speed and fuel economy. It was also the first and to this day the only overall victory at Le Mans for an American car, engine, and drivers.
That very car is now on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, in exactly the same condition in which it won at Le Mans, with one exception: The engine is not the original. After the race, it is said, the winning engine was removed from the car and placed back on the dyno, where it made seven more horsepower than when it was built. So after covering 3,251 miles in 24 hours at an average speed of 135.4 mph, the 427 was just nicely broken in. Where the engine went after that, no one is certain. However, for years one disturbing story made the rounds, like many folk tales perhaps just for its horror value: The engine that Gurney and Foyt used to make history at Le Mans was then installed in a new Mustang for the teenaged son of a Ford executive.
Repco-Brabham V-8
Did you know that an Oldsmobile won the Formula One World Championship? It's perfectly true, sort of. When Black Jack Brabham won the world title in 1966 his car was powered by an engine known as the Repco-Brabham 620, a clever bit of blacksmithing built around a 215ci Olds V-8.
Repco, one of Australia's leading auto parts manufacturers and the sponsor of Brabham's F1 effort, was responsible for the engine. However, it was Brabham himself who decided the aluminum Olds would make the ideal basis for an F1 engine under the new 3.0L formula introduced for '66. The billet aluminum breast plate that tied the block and main caps together (Americans would call it a main girdle) was Brabham's idea too-he had developed the trick on the 2.2-liter Coventry Climax FPF engine.
The Oldsmobile's stock 3.50-inch bore was retained, while a 180-degree crankshaft with a 2.2-inch stroke was installed to meet the displacement limit. Stock steel rods borrowed from a Daimler V-8 were just the right length (6.3 inches) to correct the difference in piston height, while improving the crank train geometry as well. Engine legend Phil Irving designed the simple and elegant SOHC cylinder heads with two inline valves per cylinder, along with a bolt-on timing case to house the cam chain.
With Lucas mechanical fuel injection the Repco-Olds was rated at only 298 hp at 7,500 rpm, so it was no powerhouse. But it was reliable, simple, and light-only 300 pounds. As the rest of the F1 field struggled to come to grips with the new engine formula, tinkering with complex V-12 and H-16 creations, the little Repco-Brabham walked away with the season championship. Some might say that a Grand Prix engine from Australia is not hot rodding. On the contrary: The Repco-Brabham V-8 was based on a good old American V-8, displayed ingenuity up the wazoo, and beat the tar out of the high-priced machinery. That's a hot rod.
Ron Main's Flatfire V-8
At age 65, Ron Main describes himself as a "recycled teenager" and "juvenile delinquent." And at some point along his life's journey as a hot rodder, his mental phonograph needle became stuck on the Ford flathead V-8. Specifically, he was captured by the dream of building the world's fastest flathead. "Everyone was always building flatheads just the way their daddy did," says Main. "We wanted to go faster than daddy did." And that he did, running just over 302 mph at Bonneville in his Flatfire streamliner.
"This is a 21st century flathead," says Main. While still housed in an original '46 Ford 59AB block with three main bearings, the engine was almost totally re-engineered by Mike Landy and the late Dick Landy of Dick Landy Industries. Main's 301ci flathead employs "reverse-flow" breathing-the intake ports are now the exhausts and vice versa. Also, the block has been machined so that the exhaust ports exit through the top of the engine, another exotic hot-rodding trick found in maximum-effort flatmotors. A Moldex crank with Chevy rod journals rides in steel billet main caps fabricated by DLI, while Ernie Cross of Ventura Speed & Marine fabricated the intercooler and Motec-based digital port fuel injection system. Tony Barron aluminum heads have been machined for custom combustion chambers and two spark plugs per cylinder.
Main originally considered a turbocharger, but "they build too much heat," he says. Instead, a V-1 T-trim Vortech centrifugal supercharger was selected that produces 18 psi of boost. On its standard dose of straight methanol the engine has shown over 700 hp on the dyno, but they like to keep it down around 650 hp in the interest of keeping the block in one piece. Main says that with the flathead's traditional breathing problems corrected, the engine was now happily zinging to 7,000 rpm on the dyno. However, with the gearing used on the Bonneville record run the engine was showing 5,600 rpm at 302 mph through the speed trap. So why a flathead? "Because," says the world's oldest adolescent, "the flathead is just such a pretty little motor."
Eddie Hill's Four-Second Hemi
The name of the Top Fuel winner at the inaugural IHRA Texas Nationals on April 9, 1988, must be written down somewhere-which is a good thing, because otherwise it might be totally forgotten. What everyone remembers from that day at the Texas Motorplex occurred in the semifinals, when Eddie Hill laid down the first four-second pass in drag racing history: a 4.990, bumping the speed record to 288.55 mph in the process.
Though younger fans might not have heard of him when he suddenly appeared on the Top Fuel scene in mid-'80s, Hill was one of drag racing's early stars. He built his first Pontiac-powered rail in 1958 and was a leading contender in both Top Gas and Top Fuel well into the '60s. But he left the sport in 1966 after a fiery crash at Green Valley Raceway. From 1974 to 1984 he raced drag boats, eventually running 229 mph in a blown fuel hydro, setting a speed record that stood for ten years.
So when Eddie, wife Ercie, and crewchief Terry "Fuzzy" Carter arrived on dry land in 1985, they had no lack of experience with blown Hemis on nitromethane. Their 500ci combination included a JP-1 Hemi block from Joe Pisano, Brad Anderson billet aluminum heads, a Keith Black Kryptonite crank and Venolia pistons, along with a 14-71 Mooneyham supercharger and an Enderle injector setup prepped by fuel systems wizard Don Gerardot. Still, they struggled for months to find a setup that would work on a paved quarter-mile.
The breakthrough came when they compared setup notes with fellow Texas fuel racer Gene Snow. "Eddie was really charging on the top end, but he was having problems with the first eighth-mile," said Snow. "I was really moving in the first eighth-mile, but my car was not moving the second eighth." So Hill took the best from both and merged the two setups. That move, coupled with the team's early adoption of on-board data acquisition, put the tune-up on track. Eddie won the '88 Gatornationals with a 5.089 and a 5.10 to score his first NHRA national victory, and then a week later uncorked the world's first four-second run at Dallas. For a time Hill was the fastest drag racer on both land and sea, and went on to collect a total of 14 national event wins and the '93 NHRA championship before retiring in 1999 at age 60. But arguably his single greatest achievement was the first four-second e.t. in history-after all, that can only be done once.
Bill Kuhlman's 200-Mph Big Block Chevy
For the original generation of drag racers, Garlits breaking the 200-mph barrier in a dragster was a big deal. For a succeeding generation tuned in to Top Sportsman and quick street cars, Bill Kuhlman's achievement was equally big. At Darlington in March 1987, Kuhlman was the first to run 200 mph in a doorslammer.
Kuhlman's '85 Camaro ran a 615ci big-block Chevy built up from a standard Sonny Leonard kit. "I was very short on time when I was putting this motor together," Kuhlman would say later. "I really didn't have time to check all the clearances, such as piston-to-valve or piston-to-head." Fortunately, Sonny's Automotive had laid down all the groundwork properly. A cast-iron Chevy marine block bored to 4.620 inches was stuffed with 15.5:1 Venolia pistons and a Bryant 4.625-inch stroker crank. A pair of Leonard's ported Stage Two Dart heads were topped with his sheetmetal intake and a pair of Dominators, while making the whole thing happen was the NOS Pro Shot Fogger nitrous oxide system from Mike Thermos.
Following the 7.21 at 202.24 mph pass at Darlington, Kuhlman's engine was sent back to Sonny's for a teardown and inspection (below). The only real damage found was one lightly toasted piston and a scored rod, the result of a clogged nitrous nozzle. Leonard, Thermos, and Kuhlman carefully reassembled and checked over the motor, then shackled the beast to Sonny's Superflow dyno. On gasoline alone, the engine made a corrected 1,070 hp. With the juice flowing, it produced over 1,000 lb-ft of torque at 6,500 rpm, and at 7,000 rpm it made 1,379 hp. Pretty good for a kit motor, especially in 1987.
Reher, Morrison, And Shepherd's '83 Pro Stock Chevy
There was a six-year period in Pro Stock racing where if your name was not Glidden, Johnson, Iaconio, or Shepherd, you didn't have a prayer. The "gang of four," as they became known, had the category locked down for 64 straight races. For a time Lee Shepherd enjoyed his own special domination over even this elite group, winning four straight NHRA season titles from 1981 to 1984. Only his tragic death in a testing accident at Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1985 ended the streak for one of the fiercest competitors, sharpest drivers, and all-around finest people Pro Stock had ever seen.
When NHRA settled its Pro Stock rules on 500ci V-8s for 1982, the Reher-Morrison Racing team of Arlington, Texas, was able to put its special brand of big-block expertise to work. David Reher (above right) and Buddy Morrison (above left) built the engines, while Shepherd handled the cylinder -head work and wheeled the race car. The 1983 edition of their combination was based on a rare iron short-deck marine block with siamesed 4.553-inch bores and a 3.86-inch stoke crankshaft whittled from a Chevrolet raw forging. But then as now, the key to Pro Stock horsepower was in the cylinder heads and induction system.
With a reported 400 hours of intensive hand labor in one pair, Shepherd's Chevrolet aluminum cylinder heads may have set a national record for cubic effort. Each casting had hundreds of feet of welding rod in it to elevate the intake and exhaust ports and accommodate radical angle milling. A fabricated sheetmetal intake manifold and a pair of 4500 Holleys completed the setup.
How big did this Frankenstein rig flow? Well, Reher, Morrison, and Shepherd also campaigned the same cylinder head and intake combination in IHRA, where 600 ci and more was the norm. Their 605 motor was strong enough to take the IHRA title in 1983, along with the third consecutive NHRA championship Shepherd collected that year. That made Shepherd the first racer to take both the NHRA and IHRA Pro Stock titles in the same season. In 1984 they did it again.
Smokey Yunick's 427 Mk II Mystery Engine
You just knew Smokey Yunick would always have an ace up his sleeve. For the Daytona 500 in 1963 he brought two. The first was a young Texas Sprint Car driver his friend Monk King, a Pontiac dealer in Dallas, had tipped him to. Johnny Rutherford had never driven a stock car on a super speedway, but the kid was quick and Smokey figured a race driver was a race driver.
Yunick's second ace was Chevrolet's 427 Mk. II V-8, the engine that quickly became known as the "mystery motor." Designed by Richard L. Keinath, the Mk II was the missing link between Chevy's Mk I 348/409 engine and the Mk IV 396 V-8 introduced in 1965. (The Mk III was an ultra-big-block project, stillborn.) The Mk II's short-block used the same 4.84-inch bore spacing as the 348/409, and its 4.31-inch bore and 3.65-inch stroke were identical to those of the 427ci Z11 version of the 409. However, the cylinder heads employed valves canted in two planes, just like in the "porcupine" engines that would appear a few years later. Smokey believed that despite a few teething troubles the engine was good for 600 hp or more.
There was only one problem with this scenario: On January 21, 1963, barely days after Yunick and the other four Chevy factory-supported teams received their final engine packages and only a few weeks before Daytona, General Motors Chairman Fred Donner ordered all divisions to shut down their racing programs effective immediately. The Mk. II V-8 was marooned. Some sources say 42 engines were produced before the plug was pulled; others claim as few as 18.
But the racers already had their engines, and as private contractors they were going to use them for as long as the parts held out. Yunick and Rutherford had paired up too late to run for the pole, which Fireball Roberts won with a lap of 160 mph in a 421 Pontiac. But Rutherford soon had Yunick's '63 Impala sport coupe flying, clocking a lap at 165.183 mph. It was not only the fastest speed of the month; it was a world's closed-course record for a time. Lone Star J.R. won his 100-mile qualifying race too, but in the 500 he scraped the wall off Turn 2 and spun to the infield, losing four laps before recovering to finish ninth. Smokey never used Rutherford again, convinced there was something wrong with his eyesight. Despite the apparent handicap, the kid from Texas went on to win the Indy 500 three times.

Photo Gallery: Ten Great Engines In Hot Rodding And Racing - Hot Rod Magazine

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