Twin-Turbo 470 cid LS Engine - Engine Builder Magazine

Twin-Turbo 470 cid LS Engine

A 2,000 hp twin-turbo LS engine that you could drive across the country? Yeah, we'd be alright with that too! Find out what Tom Nelson of Nelson Racing Engines did to make this LS unique.

While a lot of kids growing up had a paper route as a first job, Tom Nelson was cruising through the neighborhood at slightly faster speeds. Tom took his Go Kart door-to-door as a 12 or 13-year-old entrepreneur trying to succeed with his own detailing and car washing business.

His need for speed in his Go Kart soon transitioned into a street racing career. However, it wasn’t long before that got a little too crazy, and Nelson decided to open his own engine shop.

“My dad was always building cars, so it just came natural,” Nelson says. “When I decided to get into engine building as a profession, my grandmother let me use her garage and gave me a partial loan to buy a shop. That’s the beginnings of Nelson Racing Engines right there.”

Tom started his shop, Nelson Racing Engines, and building engines professionally in 1996. Located in Chatsworth, CA, NRE is a full machine shop that does everything in-house with the exception of crank grinding. NRE has a heavy focus on boosted V8 engines for hot rods, but will take on the occasional V6 or 4-cylinder, as well as some offshore marine and Bonneville engines.

If all of that wasn’t enough, NRE is also a full car building facility capable of chassis work and complete car builds.

Since NRE can accommodate more than just the engine, a customer recently sent Tom half of his Holden Monero from overseas to get fitted for a new engine.

“We recently built a 470 cid LS engine that is a 2,000 horsepower twin-turbo,” Nelson says. “It’s got twin-turbo patented 88 millimeter turbochargers. It’s an all aluminum engine and it’s a real street engine so the camshaft is very small and there’s not a lot of spring pressure.”

To start, Nelson bored and honed with a 90-degree fixture with a torque plate to prep the block.

“We did our custom valve job. We ported the heads. We balanced the rotating assembly to one gram dynamic. We filed the rings. We set all the specific clearances to our specific blueprint specifications, so rod bearing clearance, main bearing clearance, piston ring end gap, piston-to-pin and piston-to-wall clearance too. All those clearances were set to our spec,” he says. “The camshafts are custom and we had lobes made for us. Over the years we figured out how to open the exhaust valve and how to open the intake valve and what works for a turbocharged street application.”

The LS engine also uses a Callies crankshaft, Oliver billet connecting rods, West Coast Cylinder Heads All Pro cylinder heads, JE pistons, ARP fasteners, and Jesel shaft rockers.

“We make in-house an all-billet intake manifold called the Alien,” Nelson says. “And then there’s a piece that comes off of that which is called the Anteater, which is a special Nelson-only item. The engine also uses a Billet Specialties true track front drive. We hand fabricated the stainless headers, the water to air intercoolers and all the piping in-house. We probably have 300 hours into the engine, and the fabrication was a ton of time.”

NRE’s Alien intake and Anteater has a dual injector per cylinder and a thing called octane on demand, which forces the second injectors to inject race gas only under boost.

After Tom and his team finished work on this 470 cid twin-turbo LS engine it featured an 8.8:1 compression ratio, 2,000 hp and 1,670 lb.-ft. of torque.

Despite those staggering numbers, Tom says, “You could still literally drive across the country with the engine. It’s a real street engine.”

The Engine of the Week eNewsletter is sponsored by Cometic Gasket.

If you have an engine you would like to highlight in this series, please email Engine Builder magazine’s managing editor, Greg Jones at [email protected].

You May Also Like

Supercharged 388 cid LS Engine

Hoping to reach new heights in the mile, this Cadillac customer brought his car and engine in for the School of Automotive Machinists & Technology to work their magic on. See what went into the supercharged LS engine platform.

Cadillac Supercharged LS engine

During our week in Houston last fall, we got the chance to visit several engine shops in the area, and we also wanted to spend some time seeing where many up-and-coming engine builders get their start and hone their skills, so we stopped by the School of Automotive Machinists & Technology, also known as SAM Tech.

Supercharged 521 cid Brad Anderson Hemi Engine

Amanda Hoover and Eddie Rogers have been campaigning their Chevelle from Hell for nearly a decade. Helping give the car its name is a screw-blown 521 cubic inch Hemi engine. Check out the details of this build done by Chris Duncan Race Cars!

408 cid Nitrous LS Engine

During a tour of SAM Tech, we also got a chance to speak to a few students. One in particular, Jaylon Victorian, was nearing completion of a 408 cid nitrous LS engine. He applied his new engine building knowledge and skill set to the build, and it shines through in our latest Engine of the Week.

408 cid nitrous LS engine
760 cid Billet Big Block Chevy Nitrous Engine

Despite what you may think about nitrous engines, and those that are stock big block Chevy bore spacing, these 4.840″ bore space big block Chevy engines have some significant R&D in them. Just check out this 760 cubic inch billet version done at TRE Racing Engines.

Naturally Aspirated 440 cid LT1 Engine

The folks at Late Model Engines in Houston, TX run a top-notch engine and machine shop. You don’t have to look much further than this naturally aspirated 440 cid LT1 engine build to see what we mean. It’s our Engine of the Week!

Other Posts

Steve Morris Engines’ Twin-Supercharged 454 Big Block Chevy Engine

It had been 26 years since the last time Val Morris, Steve Morris’ wife, was behind the wheel of a drag car. The shop had been working on this project car named Sugar Momma, and got it done in time for Sick Week 2024. When it came time to figure out who’d drive it, Steve

Stuffing a Supercharged 572 cid SMX Engine in a Porsche 928

For Danny Humphreys, drag racing is a progressive disease. Ever since he watched Tom Cruise outrun a pimp in a 928 Porsche, he’s wanted the car for himself. As soon as he got one, he pulled the engine and the horsepower has gone up from there. Today, Danny has a supercharged 572 cid SMX engine

Indy Cylinder Head’s Supercharged 588 cid Hemi Engine

We’ve been following Indy Cylinder Head and the engine work Ken Lazzeri for quite some time. We got a chance to speak with Ken on the final day of the PRI show when he was kind enough to walk us through the details of several of the engines they had on display, including this bracket

Ken Lazzeri Hemi Engine
Kaiju Motorsports’ All-Billet Subaru EJ 2.5L Engine

Hands down, this was one of the more eye-popping engine bays we saw during the 2023 PRI Show. The Kaiju Motorsports-built STi Subaru is a cool car in and of itself, but with an all-billet 2.5L EJ engine featuring titanium piping, this thing stopped you in your tracks and forced your head to turn. We