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Spending half a week at the PRI Show for us is like being a kid in a candy store. Sure, catching up with like-minded people is great too, but we can’t move 5 feet without our jaws dropping from all the car and engine awesomeness. Case in point, Eddie Rogers’ Chevelle from Hell, which features a supercharged Brad Anderson Hemi engine all built by the folks at Chris Duncan Race Cars, located in Chandlerville, IL.
We caught up with Amanda Hoover, Eddie Rogers’ step daughter, engine builder and tuner, to get all the details on this build, and more specifically, what went into the Hemi engine.
“She’s pretty wild, isn’t she?” says Hoover about the Chevelle. “It’s got a Brad Anderson Hemi with Brad’s 10-degree cylinder heads. We also run a PSI supercharger, which features a pulley that’s smaller than most people realize they made. But, we’ve been in high overdrive for so long, we don’t think anything about it.
“The pulley size is because we run a high overdrive. We run the Dayco 8mm belt, which is pretty new to the market within the last year. They have been amazing for us, and we’ve been testing them out for the last three years. The Dayco belt has a white Teflon coating, which gives it less friction on the pulleys and creates less heat, so I can’t say enough about them. They don’t break, which is the best thing about it.”
Drag racing has been a family affair for roughly 20 years, and despite what the Chevelle from Hell name may imply, the car has been a labor of love for the past nine years.
“Eddie has been racing since he was a teenager,” Hoover says. “Of course, when I was a teenager, I liked to drag race and whatnot. From there, I started tuning and the first car that we really ran together was an older Corvette. We ended up getting rid of the Vette and got a Firebird. Then got rid of the Firebird and bought another Corvette, this time from Chris at Chris Duncan Race Cars. That’s how we got to know Chris so well. We ended up selling that Corvette and then started on this build.”
In the nine years that Amanda and Eddie have run the Chevelle from Hell, the engine under the hood has always been a Hemi, but modifications have certainly been done in that time.
“We’ve always had the Hemi, and we’ve always had Brad’s stuff in it,” she says. “We actually started out with a roots blower in it because we were running PDRA and the Pro Boost class. We did that with our old Vette and with this car. We had the world record a few different times for being the fastest roots-blown car in the world, so that was pretty cool. We continued with the roots blower with this car, and then, as the series changed and rules changed, we ended up putting the screw blower on.”
Inside the Brad Anderson 521 cubic inch Hemi block and 10-degree cylinder heads is a Bryant billet crankshaft, GRP rods, JE pistons, a Bullet camshaft, Manton pushrods, and plenty of other quality components.
“One of the cool things about the car is the coil-near-plug,” Hoover says. “A lot of people haven’t seen that, which is obvious because there’s not a big Mag sitting here. That’s something different that we do. We ran EFI for five years. We liked the coil-on-plug for EFI, but we went back to mechanical and went with the MSD Pro 600 and the Davis Technologies Profiler, and the car runs on methanol. We try to do some new age things and some old school tried and true things as well.”
The oiling system on the Hemi engine features a DMP oil pump and a Peterson Fluid Systems dry sump setup. With the Hemi all together, Amanda says they run the supercharged Hemi engine on 54-lbs. of boost, which makes the Hemi capable of a whopping 4,500 horsepower.
“This thing boogies,” she says. “We run 3.60s at about 212 mph in the eighth mile. We’ve run PDRA and ADRL and we love all those series. We’ve been running a lot of Outlaw stuff lately though. We’ve been running at Texas at XRP for their Outlaw race, and we’ve been having a lot of fun. This year, that’s what we’re going to end up doing again. We tend to go where we have fun.”
With a supercharged 521 cid Hemi engine in a drag car named Chevelle from Hell that cranks out 4,500 horsepower, how can you not have fun?! We look forward to hearing how Amanda and Eddie do in 2024.
Engine of the Week is sponsored by PennGrade1, Elring – Das Original and NPW Companies. If you have an engine you’d like to highlight in this series, please email Engine Builder Editor Greg Jones at [email protected].
