If you haven’t been living under a rock, you are probably familiar with our EngineLabs Engine Giveaway, presented by Summit Racing. We have shown you the process of our 1,200-horsepower Gen-III HEMI Giveaway engine coming to life in several previous articles. First, we showed you the short-block assembly, followed by the long-block and Whipple supercharger going onto the engine, both of which occurred live on the PRI Show floor.
While it’s an impressive piece of equipment, technically, it’s Schrodinger’s 1,200-horsepower Gen-III HEMI, since it hasn’t turned the crank in anger yet. (Kudos to you, if you get that joke.) The next step in the process is for us to rejoin the engine at Late Model Engines in Houston, Texas, strap it to the engine dyno, and let ‘er eat.
In case you aren’t familiar with the Giveaway Engine, we have built a Gen-III HEMI with some of the best parts the aftermarket has to offer, and the pièce de résistance is the brand-new-to-the-market Whipple Gen-6 3.8-liter twin-screw supercharger. The modern supercharger is capable of making far more than the paltry (by comparison to its capabilities) 1,200 horsepower we’re asking of it. You can catch up on the short-block build here, and the long-block, here.
Getting The Engine Ready
The first thing we needed to do, once the engine was back at LME after being assembled at the PRI Show, was to swap the crank pulley. We originally opted for an ATI Super Damper in a 10-percent overdrive configuration. However, Dustin Whipple quickly informed us at the show that we’d make way more than we wanted to with that size pulley, and since we were already more or less maxxed out on blower pulley size, we should swap to an OE-sized pulley.
ATI was gracious enough to send over the regular-sized Super Damper, and we swapped it on. Also, since we wanted to do more than just make 1,200 horsepower, we wanted to do a little testing. We wanted to see how much we could make with OEM Hellcat exhaust manifolds, and see how much power we picked up by simply swapping them out for a set of Kooks headers.
In the front, you can see the standard OE-diameter ATI Super Damper, with the 10-percent overdrive version in the back. On Dustin Whipple’s suggestion, we started with the smaller crank pulley.
The headers in question were a pair of Kooks’ stainless steel long-tubes, with massive 2.0-inch diameter primary tubes feeding into a…
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