MPW's Twin-Turbo Big Block Ford Capri Unveiled At MotorEx 2023

Adam Rogash ripped the covers off his recently completed 1970 Ford Capri at MotorEx, marking a stunning deviation from his GMH roots and proving that he and his team at MPW Performance’s talents extend far beyond stratospherically powerful boosted LS V8s.

One look at the car reveals that it’s been heavily influenced by his focus on ridiculously fast drag cars, with all the typical street car trimmings. Slung unbelievably low over Keizer wheels, underneath the Electric Blue panels is a network of intricate chassis modifications aimed at making the car a competitive radial racer, with all the chassis and suspension design and fabrication happening in-house at MPW’s Dandenong base.

One of the few elements that the team outsourced was the assembly of the 596-cube big block Chev’, handled capably by Dandy Engines.  “John Pilla at Powerhouse Engines builds a lot of the engines for the shop, but neither John nor I could find a big block to start the Capri build with!” laughs Adam. “We picked up the phone to Frank at Dandy Engines and he’d literally just finished with a big block on the dyno, and that customer had made the decision to upgrade to a 481X.”

The fat block they got their hands on is no slouch, making 1,000hp at the flywheel aspirated and on pump fuel! “If you want big power reliably, the big block was the natural evolution of our LS program,” Adam explains of the decision to run with the 596. “It’s a Brodix aluminium block with Profiler 12-degree heads and alloy rods. It’s dry sump too, which is different to many of our LS builds, but with how fast I want to go I wanted the extra oiling capacity.”

Because Adam’s interest only starts to muster at 1,000hp, the monster eight-pot engine has a pair of 98mm G57 Pulsar turbos hanging off it. Once Adam pumps the right digits in to the Haltech engine management, the Chevy-powered Capri will regularly be collecting 6-second timeslips. “It’s got everything from page six of the Haltech catalogue to the end!” Adam laughs, including a Nexus R5, PD16 and sensors on just about every moving part for data collection when their radial racing journey begins.

With designs on repeating his winning ways at drag and drive events like Street Machine Drag Challenge, Adam has come up with a fairly innovative way to switch his twin-turbo methanol slurping big block into a naturally aspirated pump fuel fatty for the long trips between drag strips.

 “The conversion takes about 15 minutes all up. We swap the fuel supply to the rails from the methanol tank to the pump fuel tank, which will help with economy on the open road. The turbos sit on Maven Performance Products mounts, so they aren’t supported by the exhaust manifolds at all. This means we can separate the turbos from the exhaust feed and connect the collectors to the rest of the exhaust that just hangs under the car like normal. 1000hp is plenty for a long-distance cruiser.”

One of the more amazing elements of the build was the ludicrously short timeframe. The majority of the work started in January 2023, with Adam’s wife Kelly and their kids regularly helping Adam at the shop after hours and on weekends to meet the MotorEx deadline. A little over a month ago, in early April 2023, the car was still in primer and undergoing final fit up and assembly!

“I haven’t had a life since January, all my spare time has been spent building the car, so it meant so much to be able to involve my family on the weekends and to know that there’s some of their hard work in every corner of the car,” he says.

As it stands, the car is at the forefront of the ‘drag and drive’ muscle car revolution in Australia, where builders demand more of their insane drag cars by adding the need for them to be genuine street cars to boot. We’ll keep you posted as the car rolls out of the exhibition hall and into the staging lanes.

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