Story by Tom Nelson

It's a funny story how we came to do a project for Boyd Coddington...

At NRE we sell and market turn-key twin-turbo crate engines. A man by the name of Shawn Dove had been enquiring about a 427 twin-turbo small block for a couple of months about which we were exchanging information. Shawn wanted to go ahead with the project, but wanted his car builder to come down and look at our shop to "feel us out."

We arranged a time for all of us to meet. We met with the car builder and spoke at length about what we were shooting for with the project. He explained to me he was a chasis builder and had a shop about an hour from us. About 30 minutes into the conversation, I could tell this guy wasn't your ordinary car builder - he was grilling me!

This guy was a chasis builder, so I began to tell him how I thought Paul Newmann chasis ( a well-known chasis company we used in the past) were the best in the business. I was literally raving about their product.

It didn't take long before Shawn's car builder told me who he really was - Boyd Coddinginton, builder extrodinairre.

"Let me give you my card." I looked at the card and laughed relizing who this was. We talked for a little while longer - he said he would think about it.

I received a call from Boyd, he was in my area and would like to have lunch. I arrived to meet Boyd and his wife Joe and Ian (the producer) for his new show American Hotrod(TM). We agreed that we would build an engine for the show and film the entire project. one catch: the work had to be completed in a short period of time, but we had 43 engine projects and had a major engine competition in New York that month (oh yeah, we were also building our new dyno facility!).

They explained they would work around our schedule and were very accomodating to us to get the job done.

We set out to build an all-alluminum 434 twin-turbo fuel injected intercooled small block chevy to develop 1500hp! All this and it has to idle like a stocker and be reliable enough to drive across the USA.

The outcome?

1480hp. 1100ft lbs or torque @ 3600rpm. Enough said.