Mail Order Monster
Total Engine Airflow makes big power with shelf parts and small cubes
Article and Photos by Don Creason, 2003

It's about 10:30 on one dreary looking Thursday morning in February. Yours truly is still puttering around the house in his PJ's watching reruns on cable and eating a bowl of chocolate flavored breakfast cereal.

Simultaneously I'm on the phone with a good friend chatting it up about my date the night before and pondering how I'm going to make good of wasting my day off. About this time my cell phone rings, I walk over and look at it, TEA is flashing on the screen meaning someone from Total Engine Airflow just down the road (well sort of) in Bowling Green, KY is calling. Not wanting to interrupt my friend whom I'm still talking to I decide to let the call go to voice mail and check it in a few minutes.

Checking the voice mail reveals that the caller from TEA was Ron Warrick Jr., his message makes him sound excited, 'something very cool is up' I'm thinking as I listen to the intro. "... wanted to let you know, we got a 306 on the dyno, naturally aspirated making over 550 HP last night, no tuning, shootin' for 600 today, thought you might want to come down maybe shoot some photos for a magazine, gimme a call."

A quick call to Ron and I had all the details. So much for wasting my day off, but a killer story was at work here, this was definitely worth putting in a hard day's work. Off with the PJ's on with the Jeans and sweatshirt, and into the truck for the two hours drive to Bowling Green.

The background behind the engine in question was a simple but wild story. A man in England with a passion for road racing and Fords had called Total Engine Airflow looking for someone to build him a small cubic inch, high horsepower Ford 306 for one of his racing Mustangs, and then ship it to him in England. This man had called several other very well known shops in the U.S. (some you might have seen advertise in the magazines), all of whom had laughed at him, or told him they simply didn't want to or couldn't build this engine. After a conversation with Ron Warrick Jr. at TEA, the customer some several thousand miles away sent Ron a copy of the rules for his specific racing class.  Ron selected a list of parts and quickly got back to the customer with an estimate. "In all honestly we didn't really think he was serious..." Ron says "...we gave him a price though and he says ok do it, and pays for it at the same time."

So the deal was done, the customer's goal was 600 HP naturally aspirated, from a 306 cubic inch engine.  High revving capability, as well as longevity and being lightweight and durable all had to be factors. While we all like those qualities in our engines or anything else high performance we buy it's even more important in this case. Think of it like this. In the U.S. we take our high performance aftermarket very much for granted. If we need a FL-1A filter, and 5 quarts of oil for our 5.0 it's as close as the nearest Wal-Mart or other discount store. If we need a set of plugs and wires, they're just a little farther away at your favorite parts house or Ford dealer. If we want to seriously upgrade anything on our car from appearance pieces to rearend components, transmission parts, cylinder heads or induction, to complete engines, all we need to do is open our favorite performance magazine, pick up the phone and give the person on the other end a credit card number. Within a matter of a few days or weeks our precious upgrades arrive at our doorstep, ready to go in the car. For some of us who are more fortunate it's even easier than that, driving just a few miles to our local speed shop.

Overseas the aftermarket for high performance Yankee built V8's is virtually non-existent. There is no Summit or Jeg's, no one stop shops for all your parts, no one to call with your parts needs and dreams, that is if your engine was born in the States. So this engine needed to be able to live for a longtime, something as simple to repair as a blown gasket might take months to get a replacement part for. Imagine that, your whole racing season could be shot because of a blown head gasket that you caught before the engine was damaged, but you can't get a replacement gasket for 10 weeks because it has to be shipped from the U.S. That head gasket then costs you three to four times what it might in the U.S. after tariffs, overseas shipping, other taxes and duties and don't forget the exchange rate. With that in mind the estimate Ron built had included two sets of replacement parts for items like gaskets, spark plugs, oil filters, carburetor parts, etc. This will allow the customer overseas to make a repair or tune up if necessary and then call the shop to order additional replacements, hopefully those replacements would arrive in time.

The first order of business was lightweight. Rules for this particular racing class allowed the racers to utilize aluminum blocks, so Ron picked out a FRPP 302 based aluminum block with 4 bolt mains and all the goodies and sent it over to the machine shop. The next key component would be the rotating assembly. A light but durable rotating mass was essential for the high revving engine, aluminum rods were out of the question because of the duration of time this engine would be run. A Scat crank was the first piece chosen, followed by a set of Carillo forged steel H-beam rods. Finishing out the assembly is a set of CP forged pistons, their slight dome would eventually yield a comfortable compression ratio of 12.5:1.

Cylinder heads were the next key component. Ron chose a set of TEA's Twisted Wedge EFI Renegade heads, and set them up with the correct springs for a solid roller camshaft. Other than the valve springs these heads are the same as any other set of Twisted Wedge EFI/R heads that TEA ports daily. They are of the same CNC program that TEA developed on their own and uses for all of its Twisted Wedge EFI Renegade heads. These heads flow an amazing 314 cfm intake and 228 exhaust at .500" lift and 325 cfm intake 240 cfm exhaust at .600" lift. If these heads are good enough for Bart Toebner, Jimmy LaRocca and Mike Freeman to run 8's in legal Renegade trim, imagine what they could do for a higher winding, larger cammed engine.

The intake manifold chosen was the new Edelbrock Super Victor for 302 Fords. This intake was hand ported by Ron, to match the performance of the heads. Topping off the intake is an 850 CFM carburetor from Quick Fuel Technologies (also out of Bowling Green, KY), this piece features dual power valves, and squared jetting to accommodate the needs of the road racing customer. Quick Fuel's trick carb. building and tuning is also a key ingredient to this engine's ability to make power. Rounding out the rest of the components are a custom cam shaft with specs right around .650" lift and duration of 255/264, relatively small by most standards to make this kind of power. Other bits and pieces include Jesel lifters and rocker arms, a MSD Billet distributor, Trick Flow 10.4mm plug wires, a Fram PH8 oil Filter, Swepco Oil, and Hooker Super Comp 1 5/8" headers (no that's not a typo, we did say only 1 5/8"). High quality gaskets were used throughout and a set of very cool looking sheet metal valve covers is going on the engine as well. (TEA improvised with a set of other covers for dyno purposes). Ron handled the assembly of the engine at TEA.

The engine was taken a little further south to the home of Wayne Hutton. Wayne and his son Scott race NHRA Super Stock, have dabbled in Pro Stock for one season, and are building what looks to be a very bad-ass Outlaw 10.5 Camaro.  On top of all this Wayne's shop is located right next door to his house. Inside the shop you'll find more bay and garage space than most of us dream of ever having, as well as a work area for assembling engines, a gym, a full bathroom with shower, and more importantly to us on this day a dyno cell holding a SuperFlo engine dyno. Ron and his brother Mark had brought the engine down to the Hutton's shop to do the break in, dyno testing and tuning necessary before it was all to be crated up and shipped to England.

The previous night with no tuning and only a few break in pulls the little 306 was making an amazing amount of power, somewhere in the neighborhood of 570 HP at about 7800 RPM. Torque was already good too, showing just over 420 ft/lbs.

The customer's goals were within sight, and bets were on as to whether or not this little engine could crank out the coveted 600 HP. Keep in mind on the Dyno Ron was still using the 1 5/8" hooker headers, 110 Octane VP fuel, and 32 degrees of timing. Temperature in the dyno cell was kept between 70 and 72 degrees, and Wayne measured other conditions throughout in order to get the most accurate corrected readings from the computer. Ignition was lit by a MSD 7AL-3 and MSD High Energy coil. We used Pennzoil 10W40 oil to start with. A warm up pull, followed by some lash adjustments on the valvetrain, and a check of the spark plugs and it was show time. The first pull revealed that the engine seemed to be going rich up top. Two different carburetors were tried with very little success in getting closer to the goal of 600. Finally the Quick Fuel carb was put on with a different set of high-speed air bleeds (32's), and the original jets we'd started with earlier (78 squared). Timing had also been bumped up one degree to 33 total.

A pull on the dyno revealed horsepower in the range of 590 at 8200 RPM. It was so close we could feel it. Wayne and Ron checked the spark plugs, while Mark and Scott changed the oil (hey I had to take pictures). The Swepco oil they added was a 15W40 mineral-based synthetic. This company is a little known secret in many a professional racer's arsenal of horsepower tricks. The next pull broke the 600 HP mark, the oil had worked, we were at 602, unfortunately we'd run out of 110 octane VP and had to switch to Sunoco 114. This slower burning higher octane was probably hurting us more than helping.

Wayne however had one more trick up his sleeve, an MSD Blaster Coil which he referred to as "My secret Coil", he claimed it was worth about 5 HP on the dyno. Hard to believe but we wanted to squeeze out as much power as possible. The coil swap was done in a matter of minutes and the final pull of that late evening (some 12 hours after Ron had originally called me) we saw two great numbers come up. 607 HP at 8400 RPM, and 430 TRQ at 6000 RPM. What was just as impressive was the torque curve which proved to be smooth and flat throughout the RPM band.

In the end it would have been great to see a magical 612 HP number come up representing 2 HP per cubic inch. The consensus was that with more 110 Octane further tuning on the carburetor, and a few more minor tweaks, we could probably have done it or even gone a little higher. Then though, there's always what you could have done, it's what you did do that really counts, which in this case is make for one very happy customer all the way over in Merry Old England.

I'd like to thank Ron, Mark, and Brian at TEA for calling me on short notice for this story, these guys are always a pleasure to work with. We'd also like to thank Wayne and Scott Hutton for their hospitality and two late nights at the dyno.

If you'd like to know more about the TEA "Mail Order Monster" or would like to order a variation of one from TEA (or if your wallet can stand it an exact duplicate), you should know a few other things first. Something specific to note is that while it was really cool to use an aluminum block and the customer required it to help reduce the weight of his car, it was probably costing some power in the form of sealing and heat. While an aluminum block stays cool it doesn't always make as much power or seal as well because of the constant expansion/contraction caused by the heating and cooling of the engine. The aluminum block is also the most expensive piece on this setup, costing a pretty penny to purchase and to machine. For those reasons alone TEA recommends the FRPP R302 block, or perhaps even Dart's new 302 block for this application on the street or drag racing. Keep in mind also that to get this kind of power naturally aspirated is not cheap, ask any Hot Street or even Pure Street racer what he's got in just the little aspects of his naturally aspirated setup. For the money though this is a hard setup to beat and being built with shelf parts, it's something that can be constructed fairly quickly, and at a decent price.

Lift	Intake	Exhaust
.100"	67	53
.200"	149	111
.300"	228	155
.400"	283	203
.500"	314	228
.600"	325	240