THE 2000HP RECIPE

How Nelson Racing Engines Builds the Most Powerful, Road-Ready Crate Engines on the Planet

- EVAN PERKINS

In the Fall of 2021, Chevrolet Performance introduced their most powerful crate engine yet—a 632ci monster big-block that churned out a naturally aspirated 1,004 horsepower. Hot rodders cheered, and magazines lauded the accomplishment of engineering—which, indeed, it is.

But in an unassuming brick-walled shop in Chatsworth, California, we have to imagine that Tom Nelson and the crew at Nelson Racing Engines (NRE) couldn’t help a subtle shrug at the news.

The team had visions of 1,000-plus-horsepower, road-ready crate engines years before most ever deemed that goal to be in the realm of possibility. Today, after 26 years in business, the NRE team churns out horsepower in glorious, gratuitous gobs.

Their hyper-developed, innovation-fueled monuments to internal combustion are available in countless forms of aspiration; engine architectures; and dispositions, ranging from mild-mannered to aggressive; and the big dogs regularly tip the dyno scales with four-digit power outputs, beginning with the number 2.

In an era where muscle cars stroll off the showroom floor with 6-, 7-, and 800 horsepower, the mills coming out of NRE still turn heads in a big, big way. We stopped by Nelson’s cult of combustion to ask the utterly obvious questions of what it takes to build a 2,000-plus horsepower engine and how to make such a seemingly volatile combination of big-boost, big cubic inches, and big power well, live.

HR] You’ve been building engines for a long time, but when did the transition from engine builder to crate engine builder occur?