Is This The Future Of Diesel Performance?

History has taught us that many times when someone thinks outside of the box, major advances can be made. Not all ideas come through and many of them that do don’t work. But every once and a while, an idea is so radical and forward thinking that it not only achieves something spectacular, but it changes an industry.

Over the past two years there has been a new diesel engine being developed and put together that could be just such a thing. Brian Spooner and Jamie Stojanowski of J&R Racing have been working with Curtis Halvorson at Extreme Engine Development to redefine what a competition diesel engine should look and sound like.

The foundation of any engine is a block. Halvorson started with a Brad Anderson Enterprises (BAE) 500ci aluminum billet block. For a rotating assembly, a Bryant Racing crankshaft is used to transfer the power from the Bill Miller Engineering (BME) aluminum rods which receive the power from custom diesel BME pistons. With the rotating assembly installed, the final displacement of the engine ended up being 511 cubic inches!

Images courtesy of Brian Spooner and Jamie Stojanowski

The cylinder heads and intake are all completely custom. They were designed and built by Extreme Engine Development. Feeding this beast air is a PSI Supercharger 206B screw supercharger.

Aw, billet aluminum rods!

For fuel, they team decided to start with some Exergy Performance 500% over LBZ injectors because they were originally going to be running a Duramax computer. Instead, they have now moved fully over to a Bosch Motorsports standalone ECU, so there are more injector options available to them if they need to upsize.

Feeding the injectors are two heavily modified Exergy Performance CP3 pumps but they will be adding a third shortly as they are running out of fuel!

The engine is estimated to be north of 2500 horsepower once they get the bugs worked out and are fully up and running. The truck was scheduled to make its national debut at the NHRDA World Finals in Ennis, Texas. Unfortunately, the Friday before the show, they were doing a little testing (first time on the track) and broke a rocker arm. So, we didn’t get to hear the engine in person, but Spooner says that this video above doesn’t even come close to how loud the engine is. Spooner said he had to wear ear plugs AND ear muffs to deal with the decibel levels!

What do you think? Are we looking at the future of diesel performance or just one radical design?

(Left) Hemi head vs this custom head. You can certainly see the inspiration and similarities. (Right) Unlike a Hemi head, there is no huge combustion chamber here, it is all in the piston like a modern diesel!