After watching the popularity and prestige of the Engine Masters Challenge grow every year, BangShift has decided to get their piece of the pie by announcing the creation of the Engine Failures Challenge, a contest to find and crown the worst engine builder in the country. There have been no classes or rules announced yet, but already interest is high according to Chad Reynolds at BangShift.

“There are a couple things that strike us about the Engine Masters Challenge. The first thing is that it is really hard and the second thing is that there just aren’t a whole lot of really good engine shops out there. The ones that are good are REALLY good. There are however tons of half ass, fly by night, hack barns that churn out sorry engines all across this fine land. We are going on a race to the bottom to find the worst of the worst.”

The other half of the BangShift duo, Brian Lohnes, has high expectations for the event. “We’ve got some stringent rules for applicants already highlighted,” he said. “If the words micrometer or dynomometer are used on the application, the person is immediately rejected. We’re looking for hill-jack, dirt floor junk. Unless that dyno is hooked to a rubber band and a team of mules we don’t care.”

There’s even some question as to how the engines will be tested. So far the pair have debated on running them on piles of old tires and possibly a food store shopping cart converted into an engine stand.

Excitedly holding up an applicant’s paper work, Reynolds began reading and declared that this candidate would be in the competition. “Ok, so here’s our guy,” he said. “This dope starts off the right way by spelling Camaro, Camero. He then goes right into a few bullshit lines about his custom ported camel hump heads and three-quarter race cam. Best I can tell, this weiner half ass-port matched a stock factory 305 intake manifold and thinks he ported the heads. This is our guy!!”

When asked if fuel injection would be allowed on competition engines, Lohnes laughed and said, “Sure! Some of these people think that fuel injection is when you stand over the carb with a turkey baster and shoot “avaiation fuel” into it. Trust me, if one of these rocket surgeons decides to show up with a fuel injected engine we’ll make sure to provide them all the tools to fail in a spectacular fashion.”

If you’ve ever installed pistons with a ball peen hammer or forgotten to put the main bearings back into an engine you were assembling, please shoot an e-mail to [email protected]!