The Engines Of PRI 2017 Sparkle Under The Lights

Each year, the racing industry’s hottest engine builders fill up every nook and cranny of the Indianapolis Convention Center with their latest wares, and 2017 was no exception; we found everything from diminutive turbocharged four-cylinder Honda engines to near-1,000-cube Sonny’s Hemi 5.300-inch bore space engines designed to huff monster amounts of nitrous.

Up above there you can see the twin-turbo flex-fuel powerboat powerplant designed by Mike Faucher at Factory Billet; look for a rundown on the strategy behind that engine’s operation in the upcoming days here.

Alternate views of the Factory Billet bullet. This thing is wicked, and powerful.

We also found many class-specific, rules-limited engines, wild turbocharged wonders, and superchargers galore. Then there were the all-new billet wonders coming out of the nation’s leading diesel shops, which we’ve already profiled right here on EngineLabs.

Diesel dynamos abound, thanks to the relatively inexpensive cost of low-volume billet block manufacturing compared to creating tooling for a casting.

And then you have the engines under the hoods of some of the Outlaw racing world’s heaviest hitters, like the Proline Racing-built bullet between the framerails of the Klugger/Fiscus Racing-owned, Racecraft Inc.-built Radial vs. The World Mustang.

LS-based engines were also a big thing at this year’s show; it seemed like everywhere we turned was another new innovation for the platform, from pistons to cylinder heads to rocker arms. It appears that many of the component manufacturers have put many eggs into the LS basket, and for good reason. The LS engine family–in all its configurations–has proven itself, and its adoption at the higher levels of the racing industry shows that the manufacturers believe in it as well.