Photo: Jesel
What qualities make for a decent all-American racing engine? Does it have to have more cubic displacement than a World War II fighter plane and enough aftermarket goodies on the market that you could fill up an entire Christmas catalog with turbos, new injectors, and a fancy chromed intake manifold you can flex on your friends with? Well, Jesel Valvatrain might not max out on those particular statistics. But that doesn't make it any less of a drag-strip thriller.
For over 40 years, the late great Dan Jesel and his eponymous company in Lakewood, NJ, set out to build some of the finest racing engines the American aftermarket cottage industry could manufacture. From NASCAR Cup racing to NHRA Top Fuel dragsters and even a few runs at the 24 Hours of LeMans, there isn't a discipline Dan or his company hasn't found itself intimately familiar with at one point or another. Today, what was once a shop no larger than a two-bedroom apartment is now a 65,000-square-foot leviathan with epoxy-coated floors and full air conditioning. Not bad for a non-GM, Ford, or Mopar-endorsed tune shop.
Jesel's latest creation, the "Equal 8" V8, is a 441-cubic inch labor of love built with the help of some friends of the shop, specifically Tom Slawko of Slawko Racing Heads in Morgantown, PA, and Charlie Weston of the Westom Machine shop in Piscataway, NJ. With their combined efforts, the Equal 8 became nothing short of a powerhouse. With a top-end supplied by Tom Slawko's own company, including billet heads and victory titanium valves, this hardware pairs beautifully with the steel rods, billet steel crank, and the custom dry-sump oiling system that occupy the guts and bones of this 90-degree billet engine block.
Even the Book Racing Engine carburetors are made of an exceptionally high-quality billet aluminum construction. It's all in the name of making each individual component of an Equal 8 engine capable of withstanding the colossal forces and pressures associated with aggressive quarter-mile drag pulls or speeding flat-out down a circuit race straightaway. With a totally unique engine architecture all its own, Jesel offers one of the very few wholly bespoke V8 muscle engine options not directly related to a Ford, GM, or Mopar engine in any way.
It's not often a tuning shop is capable of building its own engine from scratch, and right off the bat, it becomes a valuable and reliable addition to a racing team's repertoire, but with a reported 1,285 hp at 713 lb-ft of torque without forced induction of any kind, is it any wonder the Equal 8 is a winner right out of the gate? Move aside, L88 and 426 HEMI fanatics; there's something here ready to take your lunch money.
Jesel's latest creation, the "Equal 8" V8, is a 441-cubic inch labor of love built with the help of some friends of the shop, specifically Tom Slawko of Slawko Racing Heads in Morgantown, PA, and Charlie Weston of the Westom Machine shop in Piscataway, NJ. With their combined efforts, the Equal 8 became nothing short of a powerhouse. With a top-end supplied by Tom Slawko's own company, including billet heads and victory titanium valves, this hardware pairs beautifully with the steel rods, billet steel crank, and the custom dry-sump oiling system that occupy the guts and bones of this 90-degree billet engine block.
Even the Book Racing Engine carburetors are made of an exceptionally high-quality billet aluminum construction. It's all in the name of making each individual component of an Equal 8 engine capable of withstanding the colossal forces and pressures associated with aggressive quarter-mile drag pulls or speeding flat-out down a circuit race straightaway. With a totally unique engine architecture all its own, Jesel offers one of the very few wholly bespoke V8 muscle engine options not directly related to a Ford, GM, or Mopar engine in any way.
It's not often a tuning shop is capable of building its own engine from scratch, and right off the bat, it becomes a valuable and reliable addition to a racing team's repertoire, but with a reported 1,285 hp at 713 lb-ft of torque without forced induction of any kind, is it any wonder the Equal 8 is a winner right out of the gate? Move aside, L88 and 426 HEMI fanatics; there's something here ready to take your lunch money.
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