The Myth or the Legend of the 1200 Horse Power Hypermax 7.3 IDI

I am posting this to my blog because things get lost on websites and I want to keep it around. I had the video of the truck running, however I cannot find it or on the web now.

History of the engine: in the early 1990’s Bill Jahns began to work with Hypermax to build an IDI for sled pulling contests. Max Lagod from Hypermax built the engine. The engine ran for a season doing pulling contests but was banned from the local pullers’ association. So the engine was removed from its original chassis and was dropped into a 1969 F100 with a tube chassis, built C6 with a trans-brake and strange rear end. The truck was known as “Dadiesl”. According to one of the engine builders, the truck ran low 10’s and possibly made it down to the low 9’s as well (Which would have been the first diesel to do so, almost a decade before the second diesel to follow up that time.), lifted the front tires up twelve inches and weighted 4600 Lbs. The truck drag raced for a number of years and was driven on the street a to car shows but the owner eventually grew tired of the inconvenience of driving it (could only run during the summer with the help of others) and the truck was parked while Bill worked on other projects with land speed racing. The truck is said to still be owned by the same guy and is just sitting in some barn unused and still assembled somewhere around Joliet Illinois.

The engine details are unclear, but from what I can tell it made in the neighborhood of 1200-1500 Hp and 2500 lbs. of torque at the crank but around 900 Hp at the wheels. The block was a 7.3 sleeved down to a 6.9 and a 6-inch-thick bottom end girdle. The heads were ported but stilled utilized the pre-cup chambers, they used a stock 7.3 head bolts, however eventually Oringed the heads. The fuel system was completely custom with a P pump that did 6000 rpm’s with a compound turbo setup that made 147 pounds of boost along with nitrous and water meth injection. The engine was decompressed to 15 to 1 and would only start on ether.

As I said before there is very little known about this engine and who knows how reliable a lot of the information out there really is, However it is still very interesting this motor is.