Over the last three years, the popularity of diesel drag racing has skyrocketed. The new muscle cars are 3/4-ton pickups, and Cummins, Duramax, and Power Stroke diesels can be found on dragstrips across the country. But as Zane Koch, owner of Wide Open Performance in Sandy, Utah, will tell you, "There is only so fast you can make a 6,500-pound truck go."
Zane should know, he owns the world's quickest 7.3L-powered pickup. His best quarter-mile pass in the street-legal four-wheel-drive F-350 is 10.83 seconds at 124 mph. While that would be quick enough for most of us, Zane's different. He's one of those guys who always needs to go faster, so instead of pushing his race truck even further, he decided to build a proper race car.
Wide Open 7.3L
Beginning with a Top Fuel dragster chassis, reworked and updated by Chip Nelson Enterprises, Zane's company built a 7.3L Power Stroke engine into a screaming banshee. All that's really left of the original 7.3L are the cylinder heads, the crank, and the block. The engine was fitted with Mahle pistons mounted on Cunningham connecting rods, and the water jackets were filled with cement to make the block more rigid.
Of course the first thing you notice about the dragster's 7.3L engine are the four enormous Bell Turbos. Custom headers were fabricated at Zane's shop and Pius Eberle, of Bell Turbo, engineered two sets of compound turbos to feed the mighty 7.3L. Pius decided that two turbos wouldn't allow the dragster to build boost quick enough. The four-turbo compound system works by using two large turbos to compress the intake air before feeding it to the two small turbos, which then boost the intake pressure to around 80 psi at the intake manifold. And that's just for starters-the turbo system was designed for up to 130 psi.
Dual Terminator high-pressure oil pumps drive eight hydraulically actuated electronically controlled unit injectors (HEUI) that were modified by Industrial Injection. Wide Open Performance designed a custom camshaft to increase the engine's power band, and a laptop-programmable NOS Launcher progressive nitrous controller softens the engine's 1,000 hp and 1,800 lb-ft hit to the tires.
 Nitrous oxide is injected...  Nitrous oxide is injected with a NOS Launcher progressive controller in four locations for more power and as a form of chemical intercooling. Two stages of nitrous are fed into the 7.3L's intake manifold, and the other two stages are injected into the air stream between the low- and high-pressure turbos. |  Pius Eberle engineered the...  Pius Eberle engineered the turbo system for the 7.3L dragster. Zane wasn't at liberty to discuss turbo specs with us but did confirm the small, high-pressure turbos have 2.6-inch-diameter inducers, and the big, low-pressure turbos use 3-inch-diameter inducers. He said the quad-turbo system was chosen over two big turbos in order to get the Power Stroke to spool up faster. |  The 7.3L Power Stroke's quadruple-turbo...  The 7.3L Power Stroke's quadruple-turbo system from Bell Turbo sucks in air over Zane's helmet through twin Scheid Diesel air shutoffs. |