Chances are, as a reader of EngineLabs, you’ve heard the name Steve Morris, likely in the context of “Steve Morris Engines.” With a stout engine-building resume, if he says something is the “worst engine explosion ever,” you know it’s going to be bad. Unfortunately for Morris, the rapid unplanned disassembly happened to be his personal engine, in his personal racecar, at the racetrack, in high gear.
Powering his “Boostmaster 2” six-second Caprice wagon, the 572 cubic-inch SMX billet big-block engine is (was?) force-fed by a pair of 98mm turbochargers. Not just your standard run-of-the-mill Pro Mod engine, Morris’ personal SMX engine has proved its mettle as a road-going powerhouse, competing in drag-and-drive events, and proving that it’s not just a one-trick pony.
While some people would hide an engine failure of this magnitude, Morris decided to do the opposite and show absolutely everything, starting with the failure itself, and the subsequent teardown on Monday morning. You know things are bad when you look at the oil containment pan and it looks like someone used it as a shotgun target.
In the oil pan and the containment pan (which did its job admirably) were eight chunks of connecting rod big end, 16 rod bolts, and 16 rod bearing halves… well some of them were two halves fused together into a number of interesting shapes. The level of carnage in this engine would be almost unbelievable, if not for the video documentation.
“Crap happens and parts do break,” says Morris with an almost-unreal calm. “We’ll just try to figure out what happened and go from there. I’m not blaming anybody; there’s no one to blame, really. This is just some incredible carnage. I’m actually glad it’s mine and not a customer’s, because this really sucks.”
Seeing multiple connecting rods hanging out of the fabricated oil pan that looks like the hull of a battleship in the Pacific Theatre during WWII is an almost surreal sight. As Morris gets the pan out of the way, he starts finding rod bearings in various shapes among the shrapnel of his connecting rods. “This was making pretty close to 4,000 horsepower,” Morris says while picking chunks of rods out of the block. “We’re not leaning on it super hard.”
“I’ve never seen anything this before. There is literally not a single connecting rod connected to anything in this engine,” an obviously impressed Morris…
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