A couple of weeks ago, Bruno Massel and I got to shoot a bunch of fun tv footage from the KB Racing shop in Mooresville, North Carolina. We made a shop tour video, shot multiple tech segments, and had a great time with Greg Anderson, Jason Line, and the rest of the Summit Racing Equipment crew. That stuff will make their air in a couple of weeks and if you love amazing race shops you’ll love this place. Incredible.
The most mind boggling part of their operation was the machining area. They have half a dozen CNC machines including one that is so massive it has operator platforms on it. Much of the work they do goes into the engine blocks. The guys use a Chevrolet DRCE 3 (Drag Race Competition Engine) as the basis of their 500ci engine and they get it just exactly in the form you see this example in. There are eight holes in it for cylinders and after that, the owner’s imagination is the only thing dictating stuff like cam height, lifter bore location, and on and on and on.
The compacted graphic blocks are super heavy to start and as we learned huge amounts of material come out of them before they are ready to go into a car. They are machined for the parts they need and then sculpted and lightened to be effective in the car. Hell, this one seems to be a little more complete than the new blocks we saw at KB. The heads are the same way, a head-shaped block of material for them to employ their own hot rodding craft to.
Wanna be an NHRA pro stock hero? Start here.
RacingJunk: A raw DRCE 3 block is your ticket to pro stock herosim
where’s the video of the machine shop ????? calling b/s if we don’t get to see one.
We shot it for NHRA on Fox and it will air during the Phoenix broadcast.