How A Small, 6-Cylinder Engine Amazed Everyone, Including Its Builder

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Of the nearly 6000 powerplants prepared by Ed Pink since 1948, we figured his most memorable to be some form of the nitro-burning Chrysler Hemi that propelled him to international attention in the Sixties and Seventies.  Instead, it’s a tiny German gas-burner from the Eighties, as Pink explains here ...

“Every business has its peaks and valleys.  Mine started to go into a valley in the mid-Eighties, and we had a pretty-good-sized nut to crack.  So we got involved in sports-car racing, around 1987.  My old friend and drag-race customer, Jim Busby, had started running a 962 Porsche in GTP, the ultimate IMSA prototype class.  One day he called me up and asked, ‘Why don’t you do Porsches?’ 

“I said, Jim, we’ve never done a Porsche before; I don’t even know what the inside of one of those things looks like.  He says, ‘An engine’s an engine.  You can do it!  I’ve got strong connections with Porsche.  How about if I get you to Germany, to their R&D center?’   I said, Well, that would sure help.  So, he got me hooked up with them, and I spent two weeks in the engine department.  That was quite an experience.

“At first, they weren’t exactly enthusiastic.  But once I convinced them that I wasn’t there for the overthrow of Porsche or the German government, everything was okay.  Once they realized that I was an American engine builder, not a commando or special forces, then they opened up, and I got to see everything.  I got to go into the engine areas where they did the Formula 1 engines, and the 962 Porsche engines, and the turbocharged V-6 they were building for Indy cars.  I watched everything, saw how they did it. 

“It was all very different from the way things are done over here.  I could see that companies like Porsche build cars and that’s how they make money, whereas in this country, they make money and the car happens to be what companies do to make money.  That is the big difference in these two countries.

“Of all the motors I’ve ever built, that Porsche was probably the most impressive.  It was a 3-liter engine: 183 cubic inches, air cooled, opposed flat six, overhead-cam, two-valve, running on gasoline with a turbocharger.  We had that engine making 850 horsepower out of 183 inches; amazing!  I mean, that thing would run and run and run.  We ran it in the 24 Hours of Daytona, but not at that power level; we’d run it at a good, honest, 700 to 750 horsepower, all day and all night.  In fact, it got to the point where the engine made so much power that the IMSA regulators made everybody with a Porsche put a restrictor on the inlet of the turbo.  This is an amazing engine. 

“What’s most amazing about it, from a builder’s standpoint, is that you don’t have to go anyplace to buy aftermarket stuff to make it a race engine; all the stuff comes from Porsche.  I mean, you get the crankshaft from them, and you measure it and check it; it’s dead nuts.  The rods are titanium. 

“You get forged pistons, and they’re oil-cooled.  The skirt area and ring area are part of the piston; the dome is the other part.  They have some trick way of doing the piston where it has an oil channel integrated inside the dome, and the head of the piston is welded or furnace-braced, or something.   It’s a two-piece design, and they have a piston squirter in it that squirts up to the hole.  It fills the dome of the piston with oil, inside. 

“So, that’s the technology they had — in the Eighties!   We didn’t have to go to an aftermarket cam grinder, an aftermarket piston maker, or go get connecting rods, or a cylinder block, or heads.  The only thing we put in aftermarket in that engine was the valves.  Everything else was Porsche — and everything fit. 

“I find this:  To be an American-engine builder, you gotta have a machine shop behind you.  To build Porsches, you don’t need a machine shop.”

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