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Kelly Racing has completed the build of its first in-house developed engine as it switches from Nissan to Ford for 2020.
The Braeside team has been in a race against time to ready the engine, a project which has been ongoing since the announcement to switch to Mustangs was made late last year.
“It’s a massive step in this whole Mustang transition process to have completed our very first Kelly Racing-spec Ford engine,” said team owner Todd Kelly.
“It’s been a massive job, starting with the ex-Stone Brothers engine, rebuilding that a few different times to test parts as they became available, spending hundreds of hours manufacturing and designing our own parts, running the machine shop 24/7 for the last few weeks, but we got there.
“We’re proud of what we’ve achieved in only a fifteen week period, everyone involved in this project has put in a huge amount of effort to get us to this point and I’m extremely grateful to all of the people who have made this possible.
“While we’ve done a lot on this project ourselves, we’ve had the support and products from a few of our partners with Castrol providing all of the fluids, ACL with the bearings and Gates with the belts on the engine.
“Having reliable products like these really gave us peace of mind during this whole process and we thank them for that.
“It’s also great to announce as we complete this initial phase of the Ford engine program that the team has extended its partnership with Gates and Southcott and will be increasing its involvement for the 2020 season with a more prominent branding position on André’s Mustang.”
Kelly Racing has cut back to a two-car operation this year for Rick Kelly and Andre Heimgartner, building up an all-new chassis and converting the Altima used by Garry Jacobsen last year.
The all-new engine boasts a number of elements designed by the team, including the billet aluminium sump, water pump, intake manifold, pulley systems, and airbox.
The engine itself was assembled, tested and refined by the Kelly Racing engine shop, and will now be placed on the team’s dyno.
Following that it will be shipped to Supercars’ technical department in Queensland where it will be verified and homologated ahead of competition in 2020.
The 2020 Supercars season is set to be launched at an event in Sydney today, ahead of the official pre-season test at The Bend on February 18.
