Dyno Testing a Race-Spec 800+ HP Gen 3 Hemi Bracket Engine — 830 HP for Under $20K
While a short break in Hawaii was awesome, by day three, I wanted to get back to my natural habitat, a dyno room, doing what I love, with folks I love doing it with, unlocking the potential to make even more G3 Hemi powered dreams come true, and at lower and lower cost.
So shortly after getting to the mainland, and to hustle to squeeze in some more development work prior to ‘Snowmaggedon ‘26’, the fantastic team at BES Racing Engines, helped me wear out their dyno for 2 days, as the collective learning, efforts, and contributions of the Band of Hemi Brothers and Sisters keeps growing.
Today, we were focused on further development of our Race Spec 800+, essentially bracket engine. It is of course made up of a bunch of our Blackbird Performance Products (BBP) and again demonstrates the cost effective, relatively simple, great power potential of this just awesome G3 Hemi platform.
We ran gas and alcohol carbs, a base ‘traditional’ intake, different spacer arrangements, and one of our Skunk Works intakes. The engine was a 431 stroker built in a factory BGE block. The heads were our BBP Race Prep New Factory Casting Hellcat Redeye heads, the valvetrain was completely stock, the cam was our BBP Mach 3 hydraulic roller camshaft, we used Hy Lift Johnson lifters, our BBP Afterburner Ignition and all the carbs we tested were 4500 style Get’M billet.
The primary goal was to make this combination of relatively available, highly cost effective parts generate a wide, usable horsepower curve in excess of 800 HP, keep it hydraulic and low maintenance. We wanted to do it for less than $20k, all new parts, out the door, carb to pan, $21k if we throw in the control system, a bit more if you want to go EFI. Mission accomplished with a peak over 830 HP, making over 800 for 1,200 rpm.
Secondly, we wanted to give our new intake design concepts a try, even though it really wasn’t a good fit for this relatively low rpm, lower budget and carbureted build. Given it’s still in Skunk Works mode, we won’t show all the numbers. What we will say is we liked a whole lot of what we saw. Even fairly mismatched to this build, it’s performance, with a longer flatter power curve up top, on this engine in a car, it would likely outrun the more traditional intake design by 0.05-0.1 ET, and with some work, and more appropriately matched to the rest of the combination, it’s stands to be much, much better yet.
Another great day where collective racing and racing engine development expertise meets product innovation.
Having beat Hemis for two days, headed home to try to beat the snow there.
