This Tank-Engine-Powered Ford Crown Vic Sounds Utterly Absurd (27-liter World War II tank engine)

Car and Driver ^ | 7-11-21 | Mack Hogan

[dynachrome]

There's no rational decision flowchart that lands you here. No one, least of all Daniel Warner, thinks putting a 27-liter tank engine in a Ford Crown Victoria makes a lick of sense. Petty details like logic and reason won't stop him, though.

"It's not an intelligent choice of engine if you want to have 2500 hp and race. This is more just, I wanted to do this out of pure passion," Werner told Road & Track in June 2020. Back then it was just a goal. The car was far from operational. A year later, it's still got some distance to close, but a new YouTube video shows that the engine is now running. The so-called Meteor Interceptor lives.

There's still some distance to close, of course. The Meteor Interceptor has no interior, an incomplete body, and no transmission. The turbochargers are not hooked up to the mighty tank engine, meaning it's nowhere near its target power output of 2500hp. Given the idle issues, too, the team likely hasn't sorted the engine programming.

[Revel]

That car does not even have steering.

[LastDayz]

Engine is set too far back. Should have moved it forward considerably and modded the front clip thereby retaining the dash and most of the firewall. Would have done a lot of things differently on this beast especially turbo location as well as exhaust.

[Moltke]

Driver placement is going to be tricky... looks like he’ll end up somewhere in the rear seats region.

[Paal Gulli]

All this prattle about horsepower when it’s really the torque that counts. The stock Meteor makes 1550 lb-ft of Q @1600 rpm. Jay Leno has a 1934 Rolls-Royce P2 he’s dropped a 27-liter Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into (the Meteor was developed from the Merlin) that turns a max Q of 1750 lb-ft. The car will run 80 mph in top gear ... at idle.

[Don W]

Just FYI, the Crown Vic is a full frame car. Bodywork has no part in the structural strength. That said, the torque from that engine is going to force some serious improvements to the frame’s rigidity...

[Rurudyne]

I’m talking about the chunk of frame that would have been under the windshield, which they cut away.

[Don W]

Here's a photo of a Crown Vic frame. You will notice that the frame comes out to the wheels immediately after the between-wheels (under the engine) crossmember, which appears to be intact in the video. If the between-wheels crossmember were removed, bolting the frame rails directly to the engine block would serve the purpose of the between-wheels crossmember, which is to reinforce the front frame crossmember.

This is called a *perimeter ladder* frame, for obvious reasons. Early 1960's design.

[Rurudyne]

I didn’t realize they were the last non-truck frame on body.

[Rurudyne]

Or at least nearly so.

[Openurmind]

I absolutely agree... We made a mistake when we trended from small bore long stroke engines to large bore short stroke engines. That chasing of RPMs was a mistake, we should have chased torque instead. It can always be geared up because of the lower RPM.

[PLMerite]

I remember seeing a video that teased “a 55 Chevy with a Mustang engine.”

One soon found out that it wasn’t an engine out of a Ford Mustang, but a P-51 Mustang Rolls Royce Merlin.