The crazy Russian gearhead that brought us the daisy chained motors on a Lada is back with yet another insane Lada project. Only this time, instead of chaining together a bunch of regular Lada motors, he’s swapped it with one enormous truck motor.
Fiat Chrysler recently announced that their 7.0-L supercharged crate engine would go on sale for private purchase. At 7.0-L displacement, it’s just about the biggest engine we can imagine under the hood of a reasonably sized vehicle.
And then Garage 54 comes along and stuffs an equally enormous engine under the hood of an unreasonably small Lada.
It’s not a supercharged 7.0-L, but a naturally-aspirated 7.0-L out of a big truck. We’re never told precisely what kind of truck, but we can imagine it being sourced from a medium-sized dump truck, or something equally as unsightly.
As you can image, getting it under the hood of a Lada is quite the feat of engineering. First, it doesn’t fit under the hood at all. The hood is removed entirely so that the engine towers above the windshield like a monument to the petrol gods. Its exhaust would normally be called a “straight out the hood” exhaust, but since there’s’ no hood we can’t really assign that descriptor.
When it was being initially test-fitted, the 7.0-L engine actually compressed the stock suspension down to the bump stocks. Naturally, this meant that the suspension needed to be upgraded with some heavy-duty shocks and springs. The brakes were also replaced with discs instead of the stock drums, which also required the front wheels to be replaced with something that could fit said brakes.
The transmission is an enormous tunnel that burrows down the center of the cabin. Since there’s no room up front, the radiator is and coolant system is all moved to the trunk. Finally, a custom prop shaft is fabricated to actually direct power to the rear wheels without snapping in half.
We don’t actually know how much power the engine produces, but we do know that the noise and vibration it produces is apocalyptic.
Watch them do donuts until that massive engine finally quits. It’s quite the show.