If you know Drag Week you know that name Jake Stelter. This is the guy that took home the bacon in his class back in ’12 with one of the nastiest small block powered Chevelles we have ever seen in our lives. We’re talking a guy that averaged 9.97 in 2012 with a steel Chevelle that didn’t have blower, nitrous, turbos, or much more than 400ci. Adding in the fact that this thing is a 23-degree mill and you have the makings of a legitimate hall of fame mouse engine. Built by Tom Vigue of 3V performance, this wasn’t an engine that had a lot of guesswork involved. Instead it was science and bad ass parts. The thing really was a wonder.
This video comes from a couple of years after the year of drag week triumph and shows the trust small block going through even more development. The mill is on a Spinron machine and gets turned to a (for us anyway) astounding 9,400RPM. Like the NASCAR engine we showed you last week that got turned to numbers far less than this one, it is the sound of the engine “moving air” that really gets us. We watch this test from behind the control panel. It looks a lot like a dyno cell operator’s area and some of the same data is displayed. The digital readout at the bottom/center of the screen is the one to watch as that is where the RPM is displayed. It climbs into areas that had us nearly hiding under the table but man, is that noise glorious.
Oh, so how does 400ci make the kind of power it needs to create single digit time slips? How about 110lbs of pressure on the seat and a laser measured .930 of lift?! Talk to us again at how bad ass your camshaft is. We’re listening.
110lbs on the seat? That’s a typo right? It has to be way more than that.
Not a typo…. might even be less by now.
It is sub-100lbs now…
Space Shuttle shit right there.
I like the Ford blue Jake.
At 9400rpm the auditory harmonics change in a most scary and pleasurable way. It is that whole speed and weight thing. The rod and piston assembly in this thing are exponentially squared so many times its must of been made of forged (in the fires of Mount Doom) Mithril and hand assembled by the ghost of Smokey Yunick and Harold Arminius Miller. Me Likey.
Crank and rods are billet…
Completely awesome engine, I know our 400 SBC is in need of some of this magic!