NASCAR Engines Through the Years

The 2023 season marks NASCAR's 75th anniversary. We though a great way to celebrate would be to take a look at some of the engines that have been powering our favorite racecars over the years. The Museum of American Speed has an amazing collection of vintage engines, including those from Indy, drag racing, and just about anything else you can think of. So we hit up the collection to check out a few from NASCAR's storied past.

There's a reason that Doc Hudson from the movie Cars was a Hudson Hornet and not a '40 Ford coupe or a Black Widow Chevy. These things absolutely owned NASCAR in the early 50's. Why? Well, for one thing, they were tough as nails. Hudson was famous for over engineering, and that resulted in cars that could handle the abuse of racing. They were also fairly light, with a low center of gravity. Would you believe these things were unibody? And since we're here to talk about engines, these flathead straight 6's were darn near unbeatable. At 308 cubic inches, they were huge for the day. Add the "Twin H" dual Carter carbs and some factory backed racing magic in the form of the 7X package, which raised the compression to anywhere from 8.7:1 to 9.2:1 and the result was a bulletproof, handbuilt factory racing engine that made in the neighborhood of 200 horsepower.

The legendary Cammer Ford. It seems like quite a leap from the flathead Hudson above, but we're only talking about 14 years or so. The times, they were a-changin'. Developed to take on the Chrysler Hemi for the '64 NASCAR season, SOHC's are essentially side-oiler 427's with beefed bottom ends, but the star of the show is those exotic heads. They feature two valves per cylinder and those radical overhead cams that were driven by a 6-foot long(!) chain. Ford said they made over 600 horsepower at a singing 7,000 rpm.

Perhaps these engines are most famous for being banned by NASCAR as a way of stopping the Hemi vs. SOHC arms race that was resulting in wild race cars turning outrageous speeds on the superspeedways. Mopar threw a temper tantrum and sat out the '65 season, while Ford kept at it with the 427, sans trick heads, but continued to develop the Cammer for drag racing. When it was finally allowed back in by NASCAR early in the '66 season, the moment had seemingly passed. In order to race, Cammer Fords were saddled with a restrictive intake and a silly weight handicap that virtually eliminated any benefit of the free flowing heads.

You've heard the legend of Smokey Yunick's "scale model" Chevelle? Well, here's a contemporary Smokey engine that represents what might have been powering that famous attack on the rulebook. When many of us think 366, we picture the lumbering tall-deck school bus engines of the 70's and 80's. What we're looking at here is a destroked 396, resulting in a hugely oversquare engine that no doubt revved to the moon. This one also had some pop, with aluminum open chamber heads that resulted in a 12:1 compression ratio. GM used Smokey's shop (and a few others) as a backdoor to stay involved in racing in spite of the corporate racing ban, so it's no surprise that a rare experimental GM intake ended up on top of this engine.

If we're being honest, we don't know a ton about this engine, but it's just too beautiful not to show here. Near as we can tell, this is one of a few GM design exercises to create a more exotic, hemi-style head for the venerable small block. The suspected Smokey Yunick connection is likely the result of that "back door" program mentioned above. The GM brass wouldn't allow a race program, but those in the know kept Smokey's garage well supplied with speed goodies to prove out on the track. We know that this one was built on a stock Chevy block with wild aluminum single overhead cam heads driven by a Gilmer belt hanging off the front. We don't know if this was intended to be an answer to the Ford Cammer and Chrysler Hemi, but it's fun to imagine an alternate version of history that saw all three of those engines buzzing around the high banks in Torinos, Superbirds, and Impalas with wacky aero and ridiculous lap times.

Once again skipping ahead a bit, in the new century the wild factory experiments in unconventional valvetrains have more or less subsided and we've all learned to live with cam-in-block V8's in our stock cars. This one dates from somewhere around 2003, when the Penske team switched to Dodge engines for it's Cup efforts. By 2011, they were the only team running Dodge engines, and in 2012 Penske driver Brad Keselowski won the Sprint Cup behind Dodge power.

We've arrived at the 2018 season and a 358-inch Toyota engine built by Toyota Racing Development. Notable is the Holley EFI perched atop, as NASCAR finally allowed injection after a half-century of carburetion. Under the injector, the TRD engine features 12:1 compression and makes 500 ft. lbs. of torque. Are you ready for the power figure? 725 horsepower is a ton, but it comes in at a screaming 9,000 rpm!

We've just scratched the surface here. There's plenty more NASCAR history on display at the Museum of American Speed!