Things went properly awry when these engine builders from Firepunk diesel tempted fate and turned up the boost to 146 psi on this engine dyno run.
When you tune engines for high-horsepower diesel guys, you’re inevitably going to be entering experimental waters when you’ve got goals that your customers wants given a budget. That’s what we assume is the case in this particular situation. According to 1320 Video on a clip they shared of an engine dyno run they posted earlier yesterday (Nov. 30, 2017) this particular customer wanted presumably 2,000 plus horsepower and god knows how much torque while boosting 146 PSI of boost and above. As you’ll see in the video, thinks went sky high when his engine block decided that enough was enough and exploded in catastrophic fashion. Check out that video below!
Thankfully, this engine cell had three cameras set up to capture the detonation as it happened. Even though Firepunk Diesel slowed things down in a couple of shots, it’s hard to point out exactly where the failure point was. It looks like the block separated from the head, throwing with it the pistons in all sorts of direcition.
Not being a high-horsepower diesel engine guy myself, I knew that diesels reach these astronomical power gains thanks to turbocharging and sometimes sequential, but to see a triple turbo setup is truly something that boggles the mind at first glance. From what I understand, the two smaller turbos split the job normally done by the larger single turbo. This would probably help in stoplight to stoplight situations where you need to get moving but also have drag configurations setup as well.
According to the video description, if the engine didn’t self-destruct, some awesome power numbers would’ve been achieved.
This is what an engine explosion at 146psi of BOOST looks like! “Made 2212HP when it came apart and graph was still going straight up”
Can you imagine how much torque that diesel was putting out? Probably enough to do some serious pulling.
Then again, these engines are meant for the dragstrip so all that torque translates to high speeds down the quarter-mile.
While it’s awesome to see such destruction, it probably cost a pretty penny to put together. But like all things that fail, a rebuild is probably already in the works.
