There are many things to consider when it comes to building a high performance engine. First of all will the engine be in a race car or a car that is driven quite frequently on the street. If your wallet has no limits and you want the best of both worlds of being able to drive your car on the street and take it out to the track on the weekends and run 1/4 mile times that astonishes the crowd, then we will make some suggestions on building a high performance engine like no other.

First of all if you want the engine to run on pump gas without any power adders such as nitrous oxide, superchargers, blowers, turbos, etc. then you want to build the largest cubic inch motor you can get away with and put it in the lightest car possible. When I say large cubic inches I am talking about a motor in the 672 range. Sure you can build something smaller but the easiest way to build power in a pump gas high performance engine is big cubic inches.

We also want an engine that makes peak horsepower in the 5500-6000 rpm range. This means we can build a high horsepower engine that will live for a long time considering all the components are carefully matched and the machine shop along with the engine builder knows what they're doing.

Since we are building a big high performance engine the torque will be very high to start with. Sure we can bolt on a set of Brodix cylinder heads out of the box and they would probably work just fine. However, we want to go all out so we will choose a set of hemi-cylinder heads. Camshaft selection will be simple. We'll go with something that comes alive at around 3000 and makes peak horsepower in the 5500-6000 rpm range. We'll make sure the compression ratio don't exceed 10.1 and we'll use a flat top piston for better flame travel.

Crankshaft and connection rod selection is really up to the builder but you definitely want something that can handle a lot of horsepower so your high performance engine won't come apart. I won't name any names but there are a lot of crankshaft and connecting rod manufacturers that get their steel from china. Yes, they may machine the parts here in the USA but I would not take the chance with the kind of power our engine will be making. Make sure your crankshaft and connecting rod assembly originates from the USA.

We will get more in depth with this high performance engine build in another article but if you are wondering how much horsepower this beast will make it should be upwards of about 1300. Remember we will be running hemi-heads so that alone is worth an extra 150 horsepower. So just how fast will a 2800 pound car go with 1300 horsepower? Well, if the car hooks up and gets down the track according to our calculations we're talking about 7.46 at 181mph. How's that for a pump gas street ride with NO power adders.