During the day, Kyle Williams drives some of the world’s biggest dump trucks in the sand mines of Alberta, Canada. And when he’s not hauling sand in 400-ton Caterpillar trucks, he’s working in his garage. Lately, it’s a 1995 Ford Mustang with what some might say is an overabundance of turbos: eight, which is one for each cylinder in his engine-swapped muscle car.
He had been racing a 2003 Mustang, but during a race the car in front of him sprayed coolant all over the track and the officials didn’t catch it. Williams skidded through the coolant puddle straight into a wall, effectively totaling his car. It was July, and in Canada the race season would end in October so he needed something fast; he bought a 1995 Mustang rolling chassis within a couple of weeks.
For $13,000, Williams now had a rolling chassis with no engine or transmission, but it was already fitted with a cage, performance brakes, rear end, wheels, and tires. He added the 5.3-liter LS engine that had been in the wrecked Mustang and a new transmission, built a turbo kit, wired it up, and got it ready to race again in six weeks. Before the end of the season, he ran a personal best of 8.60 seconds at 160 mph on a single 88-millimeter turbo.
“Nobody thinks an LS belongs in a Mustang but I did it anyway because that’s the cheapest way to go fast,” Williams says.
Williams’ very first car was a 1996 Ford Escort LX with a 1.9-liter engine, which he bought in 2006. Car forums were rising in popularity at the time, and he took it upon himself to gather research and managed to successfully turbo his little 88-horsepower engine on his own. In the process, he blew up the first version and the second version only ran five pounds per square inch of boost. He has learned a lot since then, he says, and he has been applying every lesson he knows so far to his eight-turbo Ford. Williams had to come up with a custom stand-alone system and quickly learned there are not many people putting up eight turbos. Go figure.
“The biggest challenge with this build over the four-turbo Honda is the oiling system,” he says. “Eight turbos require so much oil, and I didn’t want to use the engine’s oil pump to feed the turbos and possibly lose oil pressure to the engine.”
With some trial and error, he figured out what would work for his setup. Dyno Day for the Mustang is coming up, and Williams says he’ll be upset if it doesn’t make 1,000 horsepower. In fact, he installed a single fogger of nitrous express just in case it doesn’t make 1,000 on boost alone; the nitrous adds another 200 hp.
It looks like a blend of a steam locomotive and a muscle car and I’m all for it.
