A few years back, we brought you an article about Ford’s new 410-cube sprint car engine. In the subsequent years, the Ford 410 sprint car engine program has continued to grow, with both Ron Shaver and “Dyno Don” MacAskill of Shaver Specialties adding their expertise to the program. EPARTRADE sat down with the pair and dove deep into the engine’s development.

“There has been so much interest lately on the Ford project,” MacAskill says. “We started this thing four or five years ago and during that time, we haven’t really been able to share a lot. The Ford guys who are interested in it have been incredible.” Long known for their results and bulletproof engine packages, Shaver hasn’t been willing to just release the packages without their usual absurd amount of testing and validation.

“The amount of testing we’ve put the cylinder head through is incredible,” says MacAskill. “We’ve made a number of changes to the cylinder head casting along the way to improve reliability. We’re at the point where all the changes have been made, and we are sending the changes to the Ford engineers, and they are moving the design changes into the castings.”

Shaver himself continues, “[The Ford engineers] have all kinds of X-ray, scanning, and imaging capabilities that we don’t have here. We have to saw them in half the old-fashioned way. That has really improved things, and they have been fantastic throughout the process.”

Beyond just the 410 Ford engine, the EPARTRADE interview with Shaver and MacAskill covers all sorts of technical questions from the live viewers of the show, covering things from potential piston failure modes, to the benefits of oil additives as well as oil types for the 410 Fords. Then, getting into the topic of crank weights, as well as crank bobweights, torque curve and RPM range comparisons between the 410 Ford and its Chevrolet and Toyota counterparts, camshaft design, and weather considerations.

The almost-hour-long interview is packed full of all sorts of interesting and useful information, so we highly suggest carving out some time to watch it in its entirety. Because, as we’ve said in the past, any time Ron Shaver and Dyno Don talk, it’s a smart move to listen closely.