Holy Horsepower! 15 Years of Steve Morris Engines

If you’re a fan of high-powered street cars or Pro Mod drag racing, then you’ve probably heard of Steve Morris Engines. If not, you might be surprised at the kind of horsepower that Morris and his team can coax out of a boosted big-block Chevy while still making it reliable for thousands of miles on the road. His latest YouTube video takes a look back at some of the channel’s dyno tests, and it’s interesting to see the power levels grow from 1500-hp centrifugal-supercharged 540s to 3000-hp twin-turbo Pro Mod setups and beyond. What’s even more fascinating is seeing that kind of power level making its way to street-driven cars that compete in drag-and-drive events across the country.

One of our favorite engines is the 3000-hp SMX V-8 Morris built for Tom Bailey for Drag Week. Morris designed and machined a billet block with water jackets to provide cooling on the 1000-mile street drive portion of the five-day event. It debuted in 2016 and had teething issues, but it powered Bailey to overall wins in the event in 2018 and 2019, where Bailey was also the first driver in Drag Week history to run a 5-second elapsed time. Morris shows an early version of the engine and then revisits it to explain its three-injectors-per-cylinder fuel system.

Morris also developed the V-16 for the Devel 16 hypercar. The car project might be dead in the water, but the quad-turbo V-16, which Morris developed based on Chevy LS architecture, was the real deal. You can see it in action churning out just over 5000 hp.

Although there are lots of little bits of engine info to pull from this compilation video, it’s mostly just a showcase of brutally powerful engines doing their thing on the dyno. If you’re a fan of high-horsepower V-8s—and one very impressive Lamborghini V-10—you’re going to enjoy it. Be warned, though, you may have the urge to throw some turbos on your project car when you see the flat torque curves and ridiculous power output from these Morris engines.

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