The Ford SOHC Hemi is one of the most vaunted and amazing products of the muscle car era. It is also the ultimate expression of Ford’s FE engine family. The wild cast iron heads were developed in just 90 days by Ford engineers when it became clear that they had nothing for the Chrysler Hemi on the high banks of NASCAR and drag strips of America in 1965. What the Ford engineers came up with in a scant three months back in the mid 1960s was an engine that made more than 600hp on the dyno and was capable of swallowing that pesky Chrysler elephant motor whole. Ironically, NASCAR banned the engine before it ever entered competition, but drag racers like Connie Kalitta, “Sneaky” Pete Robinson, and others had great success running nitro through them in the Top Fuel and Funny Car ranks.

It is a rare opportunity to see one of these engines running, let along making a bad ass 7500+ RPM pull on a dyno. Thankfully for us, Jay Brown and his pal Joel Nystrom are both BangShifters and they shared a video of Jay’s 519ci SOHC engine running on the dyno Jay has…at his house! Brown is a super smarty pants kind of guy who is one of the real authorities on the FE engine family along with its more exotic variants like the SOHC. Jay has one of the great collections of rare and one off FE parts the world has known and the dude has even written a book, which is one of the coolest tech reads you will ever have. He tested 50 FE intake manifolds on his dyno and shared the detailed results of all of them.

Jay will be running Hot Rod Drag Week again this year and we are assuming his assault on the event will be made in something FE powered and hopefully SOHC powered. He ran his Galaxie a couple of years back but valvetrain issues ate him up.

This dyno pull rules. There’s nothing that sounds like a SOHC Ford at 7,000+ RPM….listen for yourself!

Press play below and listen to a true Ford symphony!