Tony Bischoff started BES Racing Engines in Guilford, IN back in 1985, and founded the shop doing stock rebuild work and general repair.
“Believe it or not, I learned most of what I know about performance by building stock motors,” Bischoff says. “Providing a warranty meant learning how to make an engine work right the first time as well as being durable and able to run for tens of thousands of miles. The parts had to be right or the engine would be back, so my ‘stock motor’ experience proved to be a solid foundation for building high performance engines.”
Today, his shop has 15 full-time employees and 90 percent of the work surrounds high performance engines – mostly drag racing applications, but truck pulling, NMCA street car and even some marine engine work comes through BES as well.
“We do engines for everything really, but primarily drag racing,” Bischoff says. “We focus on naturally aspirated, turbo and nitrous engines. Nitrous would probably be the largest percentage of our power adder stuff. I thank God for nitrous everyday because it’s hard on parts.”
BES Racing Engines is a full machine shop too, featuring an engine dyno and several CNC machines for head and block work.
Recently, BES had an ‘old friend’ in the shop for a freshen up job. This supercharged Gen III HEMI engine has been worked on exclusively by Bischoff and the guys at BES for 5 years now. The shop works closely with Michael Bruce from HHP and engine owner Rob Goth on the supercharged Gen III HEMI, which runs in X275 and features an aluminum G3 block.
“When we received it [this year], the block had a crack between two cylinders, so we welded a piece of billet in there and re-sleeved it,” Bischoff says. “After that, the engine really just needed freshening up with new rods, pistons, rings, bearings, gaskets and stuff like that. When we re-sleeved it, we basically re-bore the counter bores and the bores for the sleeves and we press the sleeve in and bore it and re-o-ring it. The engine also had a blown gasket and the deck was burnt out, so we had to weld that up too.”
This Gen III HEMI got freshened up with Power Bore sleeves, GRP aluminum rods, Ross pistons, Total Seal rings, Clevite bearings, a COMP Cams camshaft, Jesel valve train, an ATI balancer, a Winberg crankshaft, Titek cylinder heads, and a Marcella billet intake.
While the shop does have a dyno in-house, Bischoff says it is only good up to around 1,800 hp. BES is working on upgrading their dyno to handle the 2,200 horsepower that this supercharged Gen III HEMI pumps out.
“Based on ET and weight, it has to be at least 2,200 horsepower,” he says. “It runs 4.30s in the 1/8-mile at 3,300 lbs. and probably 6.40s in the 1/4-mile. The engine runs on race gas and has a compression ratio of 10.5:1 with 30 lbs. of boost and features a Procharger centrifugal supercharger and FuelTech fuel injection.”
It’s now ‘off to the races’ again at the X275 tracks.
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].
