Video: Procharged 7.3-litre Godzilla V8 on the dyno

Willis Performance is taking the Godzilla game to the next level

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Ford’s 7.3-litre Godzilla V8 crate motor is a tuning delight for hot rodders, punching out upwards of 1000hp using both conventionally supercharged and turbo-fed systems – but what about a Procharger?

The specialists at Willis Performance Enterprises in Michigan wanted to find out, using a customer’s brief of an 850hp, low-stress Godzilla as a template.

Willis Performance is headed by Brian Wolfe, who was the former Director of Global Engine Engineering at Ford. He’s been toying with Ford Modular V8s and the Godzilla mill since the donk (plucked from the current F250) was made available as a crate motor last year.

For this Procharged package, aftermarket goodies include a set of Wiseco pistons, Callies rods, a Daly dry sump system and a pair of Willis’s tickled Stage 2 heads – along with a mild Willis-spec’d Callies hydraulic roller cam and an air-to-air intercooler along with the F1-A94 ProCharger.

The block, crank, intake manifold, throttle body and headgaskets are all still Ford original parts, and with just a breath of less than 9psi of boost the package punched out 965hp and 845ft/lbs of torque with a modest 5900rpm top line before running out of injector.

“It’s all about reliability, making power and keeping it low stress on everything,” said Brian. “I was pretty surprised with the big pulley on the centrifugal supercharger that we made that much power on that low RPM.”

Brian has run other packages to over 7000rpm with ease, and says this combination could easily push north of 1200hp with a pulley change, new intake manifold and bigger injectors.

While this is the first Procharged package Willis has experimented with, it has already done plenty of development work with conventional blowers on these Godzillas with stunning results.

Brian threw a 3.0-litre Whipple blower onto a renovated Godzilla to the tune of 16.5psi, 1450hp and 1,030ft/lbs of torque with a redline of 7800rpm.

That package delivered a 5.01 down the eighth-mile in Brian’s Foxbody Mustang, but now he’s using the same car and engine to push the Godzilla envelope even further with a crank-driven ProCharger setup.

“We did some great development with that (the Whipple) this year,” he said. “So for 2022, we want to understand a different supercharger’s performance as well as the twin turbo car we are doing.”

A twin turbo car? That’s right, while the crank-driven ProCharged Foxbody is still in the works, Brian and the Willis crew have just finished this insane twin-turbo Godzilla package stuffed into his son’s silver fourth-gen Mustang.

The car has only just been completed in preparation for the PRI show taking place on December 9-11 in Indiana, with no dyno or power figures available just yet.

What we do know is the internals are much the same as the 965hp ProCharged engine, but with a DCE intake manifold, Australian-made TurboSmart wastegates and BOVs, and a pair of Borgwarner 69mm turbos.

Brian is expecting 1400hp from the package when it’s dialled in, and we’ll be watching with close interest to see how far the firm can push both this and the crank-driven ProCharged Foxbody in future development.

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