This is the Twin-Turbo Intercooled Outlaw 427 from Nelson Racing Engines (NRE), it’s good for 1,400 bhp on high-octane race gas, or 1,200 bhp on regular 91 octane pump gas.
This makes it one of the most powerful crate engines money can buy, particularly when you look at the motors that can be run on pump gas, and each is built to order, then dyno-tested before it ships out to the customer.
This is the Twin-Turbo Intercooled Outlaw 427 from Nelson Racing Engines (NRE), it’s good for 1,400 bhp on high-octane race gas, or 1,200 bhp on regular 91 octane pump gas.
History Speedrun: Nelson Racing Engines
Nelson Racing Engines was founded in Chatsworth, California, in 1995 by Tom Nelson. His interest in forced induction engines dates to the mid-1980s, when his father fitted a pair of turbochargers to a De Tomaso Pantera and took him along on full-boost runs through the San Fernando Valley. You can see how that would become a core memory.
Nelson built his first engines in his grandmother’s garage, he then later bought a machine shop that came with a DTS dynamometer, and spent his early years building supercharged big-blocks for offshore powerboat companies before turning almost entirely to turbocharging.
He showed a twin-turbo small-block Chevrolet package at the 1999 PRI Trade Show, and in 2006 the company built the F-Bomb, a 1973 Camaro with a twin-turbo 406 cubic inch (6.7 liter) small block, for legendary Hot Rod editor David Freiburger. For the 2009 film Fast & Furious the production team built replicas of the F-Bomb that were actually naturally-aspirated GM crate V8s, and the original F-Bomb never appeared on screen, though it was there in spirit.
In 2007 Nelson filed a patent for a twin-turbocharging system in which the two compressor wheels rotate in opposite directions, so the turbos, manifolds and intake plumbing on a V8 can be built as mirror images of each other. It was granted in 2009 and sold as the “Mirror Image” turbo series.
The NRE facility now occupies 16,000 square feet with a little over a dozen employees, and Nelson put their output at about four engines a week on average.
The Twin-Turbo 427 Intercooled Outlaw Series
The Intercooled Outlaw 427 is a complete LS-architecture V8 that NRE developed in-house, with 1,200 bhp at 7,200 rpm on 91 octane pump gas and up to 1,500 bhp on race fuel. Every engine is run on a dynamometer before it ships to ensure it meets those targets.
The block is a Concept Performance LSR, an aftermarket casting in 356-T6 aluminum with ductile iron sleeves and a six-bolt-per-cylinder head pattern in place of the production LS layout’s four main bolts, for more clamping force to better handle the boost.
NRE finishes it at a 4.125 inch bore on the standard 9.240 inch deck height, it’s fitted with a Dart billet crankshaft with a 4.0 inch stroke, Boostline 6.125 inch forged 4340 I-beam connecting rods and custom CP pistons forged from 2618 alloy at a 9.0:1 compression ratio. That bore and stroke work out to 427.7 cubic inches (7.0 liters), hence the 427 designation.
Cylinder heads are Air Flow Research 260cc LS3-pattern rectangular-port castings in six-bolt form, fully CNC ported, held down with ARP fasteners over Cometic MLX multi-layer steel gaskets. The valvetrain uses a custom hydraulic roller camshaft, GM lifters, a Comp Cams shaft-mount rocker system, Manton pushrods and a Rollmaster timing chain, with a high-volume oil pump and a Holley 302-3 pan below.
Boost comes from a pair of NRE’s own 72 mm Mirror Image Generation 2 turbochargers with billet compressor wheels, fed by NRE-built 304 stainless exhaust manifolds and regulated by TiAL V60 wastegates, with TiAL Q blow-off valves on the charge side.
The Intercooled Outlaw 427 is a complete LS-architecture V8 that NRE developed in-house, with 1,200 bhp at 7,200 rpm on 91 octane pump gas and up to 1,500 bhp on race fuel. Every engine is run on a dynamometer before it ships to ensure it meets those targets.
A Tick Performance billet upper plenum with an integral intercooler core sits on a Holley Lo-Ram manifold with a 90 mm drive-by-wire throttle body, so no external intercooler is needed. The installer adds an inline water pump, plumbing and a heat exchanger. Fuel is delivered by flow-matched Deatschwerks 1,500cc injectors under a Holley Terminator ECU with a 60-2 crank trigger, and a Wegner billet serpentine kit carries the alternator, water pump, power steering pump and air-conditioning compressor.
The Intercooled Outlaw 427 can be ordered online through the Nelson Racing Engines website here, with pricing starting at $41,999 USD.
Images courtesy of Nelson Racing Engines
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