While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
Kevin Braun and Pete Aardema work out of a shop in San Diego, California, doing perhaps what every engineer dreams of: They build no-compromise, high-horsepower internal combustion engines from scratch, largely for land-speed racing at Bonneville and El Mirage and for the occasional hot rod. And, as the rows of SCTA timing plaques mounted to their shop wall attest, they're mighty good at what they do, with dozens of records to their name.
Outside of the tight-knit congregation of land-speed racers and others who make speed their singular life's pursuit, however, they remained relatively unknown to the wider automotive hobby until recently, when Greg Quirin started to visit their shop with GoPro in hand and have them explain exactly what goes into their scratch built engines. When we say scratch built, we really mean they engineered and built just about everything in their 279 MPH 920hp 6.0L V-12:
Similarly, though they call their 238 MPH dual overhead-camshaft four-cylinder engine a Model A engine, they're literally rewriting the rulebooks on exactly how little Model A they can get away with:
So they were rather well-prepared when a load of parts left over from Richard Moser and Harvey Crane's attempt to build a quad-cam small-block Chevrolet V-8 ended up on their workbenches in need of reverse- and re-engineering to see the true potential of the project:
