Weird and wonderful V8 engine swaps – car pictures of the week

Car modification is a broad spectrum. Some fit M-style wingmirror caps to their 1-series or fit a gurney flap to the spoiler of their Ford Fiesta ST and call it a ‘build’. Others turbocharge their once naturally aspirated RenaultSport Clio, or slide a totally aftermarket cam, cylinder head and rotating assembly into a Corvette and play it down. 

Then there are the Craig Taylors of this world, who are in the business of stuffing V8s into the engine bays of cars that were definitely never designed for them and fettling the whole thing so everything runs like it came out of the factory. We visited his company Dynotorque to get the lowdown on this factory of Frankensteinian monsters in issue 338 of evo Magazine. Here are our favourite shots.

Craig has under the roof of his company Dynotorque, V8 converted over 100 cars whose makers could never have imagined them taking eight-pot power. Mitsubishi Pajero Evo, Mazda RX-7, Porsche 911, TVR Sagaris, Honda S2000 – all have received hopped-up GM small blocks, with Taylor designing and manufacturing subframes and engine cradles, before plumbing the engines in via standalone aftermarket ECUs and fitting custom exhausts with bespoke routing. These cars aren’t just heart swapped either. They often get suspension setups to account for the change in weight or distribution, steering and geometry setups.

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Some transplants are for competition, the GM small block a popular platform in all racing and drifting disciplines. Some are just for the fun of it. Some, there’s a common theme for some here. The likes of the RX-7 and 997 911 are cars whose standard engines have Achilles heels – faults that are known to claim the lives of the engine, whether that’s bore scoring and IMS bearings in the 911, or apex seals in the Mazda. So while some might see these conversions as sacrilege, in reality, they’re actually another lease of life. These cars are given a future – a strange one, but a future nonetheless.

‘I nearly talked well-known car snapper Jamie Lipman into buying a Porsche 914 with a Chevrolet small-block when he and I were at an auction near his home in Palm Springs. It’s a popular conversion in the US. A modern equivalent, also popular in the States, is fitting an LS3 into a Cayman. Sacrilegious to many but to me a very interesting technical challenge. Obviously Craig Taylor has done this swap.

‘Not one I’d tackle again,’ he says, ‘as it’s one of the most complicated jobs we’ve ever done. When the Americans do this swap they slot the engine into the standard engine bay but the accessories end up hitting the Cayman’s rear bulkhead, which means that the motor has to be moved back in the chassis. Problem with this is that the driveshafts end up at an angle that chews through universal joints very quickly. Our solution, and this is why it was so time-consuming, was to move the bulkhead itself forward by a few inches.’ – Colin Goodwin, motoring journalist and evo contributor, who visited Dynotorque.

Read the full feature in this month’s issue of evo magazine, issue 338 (October).