When car enthusiasts think of engine swaps they probably think most about General Motor’s famed LS or even a Suzuki Hayabusa for smaller cars. But some enthusiasts want to do bigger, crazier swaps. One Swedish car enthusiast has mated a Ford Crown Victoria with a Rolls-Royce Meteor V12, an engine meant for a tank.
Daniel Werner has had the big idea for quite some time. The car enthusiast living in Sweden wanted something different, something huge. He wanted to do something even bigger than the predictable options. His first ideas involved sourcing aircraft powerplants. Werner eyed a massive 37-liter Rolls-Royce Griffon straight from a Spitfire, but he ultimately landed on a 27-liter Rolls-Royce Meteor V12.
But that V12 had to have a home, and Werner chose none other than a former police car from Stockton, California. It needed a new engine and he had one, albeit one a bit bigger than the V8 it came with. Put on your best headphones and hear this beast start:
The project, named the Meteor Interceptor has been over a year in the making. As you could probably guess, it takes a lot of work to fit a 27-liter tank engine into a space normally reserved for a 4.6-liter V8. This engine weighs as much as a car all on its own.
Werner and his team had to fit the front end of a Chevrolet C10 up front just to cradle the massive engine and even then the engine is so huge that it pokes into the interior.
As the Engineer notes, the Meteor was basically a de-rated version of the famous Merlin aircraft engine without a supercharger and other components. The engine would then be fitted in Cromwell tanks to fight in World War II.
And that engine is a giant upgrade in performance, too. The last Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors made 250 horses while the Meteor was known to make about 600 HP when fitted to those Cromwell tanks. But Werner’s team isn’t going to just settle for more than double the power of stock. With the help of twin BorgWarner S500X turbochargers he hopes to get the engine running 30 pounds of boost and an incredible 2,500 HP.
A trip down the build’s Instagram shows that the team has a lot of clever thinking going on. The team has to custom fabricate a lot of parts since the engine wasn’t meant to fit into the body of a Crown Victoria with the frame of a Chevy C10. The engine itself also has a custom ECU just so it can run and it’ll be mated to a TH400 transmission.
They have a long way to go, but the finished build will get a lap time around the Nürburgring and it’ll be awesome to watch. The world needs more people cramming unorthodox engines into cars and racing them.