09/02/2026
Every engine builder on this page works in a shop. Ed Pink's shop was in Van Nuys. Smokey Yunick's was on North Beach Street in Daytona. Bill Jenkins ran his from Malvern, Pennsylvania. Kenny Duttweiler builds the engines for the fastest piston powered vehicle on Earth from a cinder block building behind a sandwich shop in Saticoy, California. A beat up desk. A beat up chair. A tiny office in a well aged building that nobody would look twice at from the street. Inside that building, Duttweiler builds twin turbocharged small block Chevrolets that have exceeded 481 mph at Bonneville. The gap between the exterior of the shop and the output of the engines inside it is the widest in American motorsport.
Duttweiler made his name in the 1980s and 1990s doing what nobody else in the V8 world took seriously: turbocharging. While every engine builder on the drag strip and at Bonneville was chasing cubic inches and nitrous, Duttweiler saw the future in boost. His early work on the Buick 3800 turbocharged V6, the same engine we covered in our Buick V6 post, proved that a 3.8 liter six cylinder with a turbocharger could beat big block V8s on the drag strip. The Grand National community already knew the 3800 had potential. Duttweiler proved the potential had no ceiling. His innovations in boost control, fuel delivery, intercooling, and electronic engine management transformed the Buick V6 from a curiosity into a weapon. The techniques he developed on the Buick became the foundation for everything that followed.
What followed was Speed Demon. George Poteet and Ron Main built the streamliner in 2010. Duttweiler built every engine that went into it. The progression is the story: a 299 cubic inch Hellfire small block Chevy making 1,980 HP at 9,300 RPM reached 426 mph in 2011. A 347 cubic inch version making 2,076 HP at 8,800 RPM reached 439 mph in 2012. A 388 cubic inch version making 2,670 HP at 8,800 RPM pushed past 450. And the record setter: a 557 cubic inch Dart based big block with twin 88mm Precision turbochargers making 3,156 HP and 2,106 lb-ft on methanol reached 481.576 mph in August 2020, setting the SCTA record at a two way average of 470.016 mph. The fastest piston powered, wheel driven vehicle on Earth. Single engine. Rear wheel drive only. In a class where conventional wisdom says you need multiple engines and four wheel drive to compete. Duttweiler's single turbocharged V8 beat them all.
The specific output numbers are the detail that separates Duttweiler from every naturally aspirated builder on this page. His 299 cubic inch D Class engine made 6.6 HP per cubic inch. His 347 cubic inch C Class engine made 5.98 HP per cubic inch. The Hayabusa at 11 HP per cubic inch is the only engine on this page with higher specific output, and the Hayabusa is a motorcycle four cylinder, not a pushrod V8. Duttweiler's numbers from a Gen I small block Chevy, pushrod valvetrain, two valves per cylinder, cam in the block, iron block derivative architecture, at nearly 6.6 HP per cubic inch on methanol with twin turbos, are the highest specific output any American pushrod V8 has ever achieved. The same basic engine architecture that Ed Cole designed in fifteen weeks in 1954 is making 6.6 HP per cubic inch at Bonneville seventy years later because Kenny Duttweiler understands boost the way Ed Pink understood machining tolerances and Waddell Wilson understood oil pressure.
The Speed Demon program suffered a tragedy in 2025 when driver Chris Raschke was killed during a record attempt at Bonneville in the third generation car, which was chasing 500 mph. George Poteet, the original owner and driver, had died in 2024. The car that Duttweiler's engines had powered to every record it held lost both the man who conceived it and the man who was carrying it forward within a year of each other. The 500 mph barrier, the goal Duttweiler had been building toward with increasingly powerful engines, remains unbroken by a piston powered vehicle. Whether Speed Demon returns is uncertain. What is certain is that every record the car holds, every mph above 400 that a piston engine has achieved on the salt, was powered by an engine built in a cinder block building behind a sandwich shop by a man who let his work speak for itself.
