1190HP GODZILLA-POWERED CAPRI BREAKS HEARTS OFF-STREET RACING

Tim Cross’ idea of dialing back his Capri drag car involved installing a Harrop supercharged 7.3L Ford Godzilla engine, which instantly makes him our kind of bloke! 

“I’ve owned the car for around eight years and years ago it had a twin turbo 360 cube engine that went 7.80sec at 178mph. It didn’t have enough roll cage in it to keep racing at that level so I sold it and ended up buying it back as a rolling shell a short time later,” he reveals, subsequently stuffing a 440 cube aspirated engine combo into it.

“It was a bit of an animal!” says Tim nonchalantly. 

Speaking with Dandy Engines’ Frank Marchese - who runs the engine program on Tim’s Cortina race car - Frank suggested to Tim that the new Godzilla engines might be up his alley, and quickly a plan began to evolve.

The Godzilla engines are somewhat of a hybrid, punching out huge capacity and making astonishing power leading many to categorise them as a big block, however their bore spacing places a foot back in the small block camp. Outwardly, they’re not dissimilar looking to an LS engine, though much larger, and boast aluminium heads, a forged crank and 10.5:1 comp’ from the factory.

“The Capri is pretty lucky because the cross member is in the middle of the engine bay, a bit like the Mustangs, and there’s already kits in the States to fit the Godzillas to the Mustangs. We bought a 417 Motorsports oil pan, I made my own engine mounts and it sits roughly where the 440 cube engine was - the gearbox is in the same position, we even used the same tailshaft!” he reveals.

The numbers on the box will tell you that the Godzilla crate engine makes 430hp at 5500rpm and 475 lb.ft of torque at a lazy 4000rpm, which is hardly enough to excite a bloke like Tim. 

“Nathaniel from Fueltech’s XA Falcon runs a Godzilla engine with a Harrop blower and he and the Dandy Engines crew really rate them. They’re a neater package than a turbo set up with all the plumbing, and after I repaired the engine bay after the twin turbo 360ci combo’ I swore I’d never cut this car up again,” explains Tim of his decision to run with a Harrop TVS2650 pump to jam the monster Ford donk full of air.

“The way the car starts and drives with the modern engine is like a brand new, factory car. Aside from the camshaft upgrade and the sump the entire engine is standard, but when you crack the throttle the Harrop ‘charger dumps 12psi down it and it bakes the tyres!” gleams Tim.

The combo is governed by a Fueltech computer, giving Tim the flexibility to switch between pump 98 and E85 whenever he’s got the Capri out lapping the streets, but he’s quick to admit that his preference is always to run his boosted cars on the corn juice. The Capri makes 1190hp and over 1000 lb.ft from as early as 3000rpm thanks to the combination of boost and big cubes. 

“I’ll definitely race it, but it’s not my race car,” clarifies Tim who has the Capri earmarked for road trips and events like Street Machine’s Drag Challenge. “The car hooks really well so we’ll do some off-street drag stuff,” he says in closing.