If you’ve been a fan of EngineLabs for more than half a second, you know about our annual EngineLabs Giveaway series. This year, we partnered with Summit Racing and Ford Performance to build a twin-turbocharged Ford 7.3-liter Godzilla engine on the 2022 Performance Racing Industry Show floor. Once complete, it went home with Late Model Engines for the final cold-side fab work and tuning.

In the meantime a giveaway winner was chosen, who happened to only live a few hours from LME, which simplified the logistics quite a bit. Once the cold side was fabricated and in place, LME wrapped up all the heat-sensitive components with DEI heat wrap, wired up the OBR control pack, and started to make pulls on the dyno. Since John — the engine’s winner — stated that 1,000 horsepower was more than enough for him, LME’s goal was an easy 1,000 horsepower.

When it comes to making power, E85 is a popular choice. For our dyno testing, we opted for Boostane’s new E85 Race Fuel, which uses race gas for the 15-percent non-ethanol component.

With 7.3-liters of displacement, 10.5:1 compression, a pair of Turbonetics 64mm turbochargers, and Boostane E85 Race Fuel fueling the fire through a set of Deatschwerks 1,500cc injectors, LME’s Vinny Monighetti was confident that the four-digit mark wasn’t going to be too much of a challenge. After running the break-in process on the dyno, he was proven right.

The first power pull made on the engine only had 6.5 pounds of boost pressure reaching the engine. The dyno graph showed 972 horsepower on that run. Adjusting the preload on the wastegate spring (not swapping the spring itself) netted another 10 horsepower. A little more preload on the wastegate actuator picked up an additional 0.5 psi at the intake manifold which made a huge jump to 1,015.9 horsepower and 884.2 lb-ft of torque, on just spring pressure — 7 psi.

Rather than changing wastegate springs after the first pulls, we simply added some preload to the spring assembly, giving us another 0.5 psi of intake pressure.

Only seven pounds of boost pressure resulted in the goal being met and slightly exceeded. “My original guess was that it was going to take 8 psi to get to 1,000 horsepower on this combo,” says Monighetti. If you were to take the 35 horsepower per half pound of boost we just saw, and turn it up to 10 or 15 pounds, 1,200 horsepower would be pretty easy with this combination. I sure hope John has some good tires on his truck.”

With that, it was time to crate the engine up and prepare it for shipment. Although, it wasn’t going onto the back of a freight truck. This year’s EngineLabs Giveaway engine was loaded into the back of LME Owner Bryan Neelen’s pickup truck, as he decided to deliver the engine to the winner himself. Make sure to subscribe to the Power+Performance YouTube channel to see the delivery, and how excited our winner was to receive his 1,000-horsepower twin-turbo Godzilla engine.

And there it is. 7 pounds of boost from the Turbonetics turbochargers makes 1,015.9 horsepower and 884.2 lb-ft of torque. It really wouldn’t take much to get 1,200 horsepower out of this combination.

The awesome EngineLabs Giveaway engine journey to 1,000 horsepower, as well as one lucky fan’s dream, is made possible thanks to our partners in this project: Summit Racing Equipment, Late Model Engines, Ford Performance Parts, Mountain Top, ATI Performance Products, BOOSTane, Brian Tooley Racing, Callies Performance Products, Cometic Gasket, DeatschWerks, Design Engineering, E3 Spark Plugs, Indy Power Products, Johnson Lifters, K1 Technologies, Klotz Synthetics, Kooks Headers, Operational Speed Supply, Precision Turbo, Ryno Classifieds, SCT, Wiseco Pistons, and Wrenchers.