When it comes to aftermarket cylinder heads for the Chrysler Gen-III HEMI, there really aren’t that many options. Edelbrock noticed the same thing and set out to develop a serious Gen-III HEMI cylinder head, able to handle the demands of full-race applications. The result of 18 months of R&D is the Victor Gen-III HEMI head.

“All of the design work for this head has been done over the last year and a half,” explains Michael Sanders, Edlebrock’s Director of Product Management. “We focused on the port work as well as the bridging area of the rocker arms to stabilize the valvetrain. Those are all new features and it’s something no one has really seen before.”

Identifying the OEM design’s weaknesses was the key to developing this head. “On a traditional HEMI head, the valve is really short, so the spring pocket drops down into the intake port, causing the air to have to go around it,” Sanders continues. “We’ve raised the pad, rotated it a bit, and then bridged everything so you don’t have to run the girdles between the shafts anymore. That gives us the ability to run more lift with the cylinder head. You can run up to .700-inch of valve lift on the Victor head.”

A large part of the design focus is the valvetrain layout and arrangement. This setup allows for up to .700-inch of valve lift.

Those are serious changes from stock, but are perfectly in line with what we’ve come to expect from a product carrying the “Victor” name. “It’s a full-race head at this point. It has 55-degree valve seat angles on both the intake and exhaust. Dart has the new six-bolt Gen-III HEMI block, so there are six bolts per head on this design. This head is built around that block’s capabilities.”

With such a significant amount of R&D time put into the new design, it might surprise you to hear how quickly the design went from paper to finished part. “This head went from a CAD model to an actual aluminum casting in only four weeks,” Sanders reveals. Even with today’s technology, that seems like an incredibly short amount of time for such a complex and intricate part.

Those layer lines are from the 3D-printed sand molds used to rapidly bring this Gen-III HEMI head from computer screen to cast aluminum part.