Popular Hot Rodding's recent issue (Feb 2010) gives a lot of details on the engines that competed in their most recent 2009 Engine Masters competition.

For 2009 the rules were changed to allow dual carbs, tunnel ram intakes, etc., Also the RPM range was raised (the range where power would be measured and compared) to 3000 - 7000 RPM. This is up 500 RPM from the 2008 competition.

There were 30 engines that showed up for qualitfying; GM, Ford, Mopar, and a small sampling of Fuel Injected power plants.

Here are some interesting things I saw, at least to me they are:

1. Of the 30 entires, 20 of them were running CompCams camshafts. Two engines ran ISKY cams and three engines had Cam Motion cams. Two cams were solid flat tappets but the remainder appear to be solid rollers.

2. Out of all the 30 engines, only two made peak power at 7000 even though there was no restriction on camshaft selection, etc. Since average power was the critical component, apparently shooting for max power at 7000 was a losing proposition.

3. A LS1 (TPIS offering), LS2 and two LS7s competed. One of the LS7s took 2nd place but both of them were running a carb.

4. Also very interesting was the cylinder heads the engine builders chose. I didn't see the one's I expected to see; you know, the ones we read about so often on this and other Forums.

The 2nd place LS7 actually BLEW AWAY the winning small block Ford engine in power, but was handicapped by needing 32 more cubic inches to do so (403 Vs 435). So because of the formula being used, the Ford won by something like 1.4 points.

All in all it's an interesting article and if Popular Hot Rodding does as it has in the past, there will be subsequent articles giving more details on the engines, like LSA, cam phasing, head specifics, etc.

Just thought your guys would be interested.

Jake

 

info thanks

 

Cool! Its about time. I have read EM for years. I always felt the relevance of the challenge engines was marginalized buy the RPM limit.

 

I was have also watched this series for some time... and I thought it represented the "streetable engine" now it seems they may have raised the bar a bit higher.. and though they allowed more choices this year isnt it amusing to see the prevailing thinking be single carbs with broad power ranges rather than the peaky narrow band multi carbed race motors?

 

I’ve always followed the EM series, because the Dyno results are pretty well controlled (no one is selling anything), and you could argue that because the scoring depends on the area under the torque and horsepower curves, these could be considered “Top Level” street engines.

I’ve kept a spreadsheet of all the EM series engines (spec’s and results) since they changed from fixed displacements.
The averages (winners and losers) are very interesting to look over.
It’s like asking some of the best engine builders what cam would you pick vs CID, what’s the most efficient CID, what target RPM peak for HP and TQ, etc. etc.

Here are some of the more interesting averages (from ALL engines for the last several years)

Average PEAK HP/CID and TQ/CID vs. CID results:


Average DURATION they picked vs. CID:


Average RPM peak for HP & TQ vs. CID:

 

wow superl98, that's some pretty fancy footwork you've done there

I think this next year carbs will be handicapped vs EFI so you might see a better showing from the EFI guys...