Courtesy of Engine Builder by Evan Laux

Engine building and diesel performance in general is not for the faint of heart. Any number of things can go wrong with an expensive build leading to partial or complete failure. Running down the drag strip even once is super stressful on the engine under these extreme loads, and it isn’t uncommon for parts to quickly wear out or break completely.

That means reworking and rebuilding engines for competition events is typical, and oftentimes a full year between annual events still isn’t enough time to get builds in working order. Unfortunately, that doesn’t bode well for us as we’re always pumped to see a badass truck run down the drag strip, but nonetheless we’re happy to see a great engine build up close.

That was the case this year at the Ultimate Callout Challenge at Lucas Oil Raceway. Early on in the weekend we stopped by the Maverick Diesel tent to see what the guys over at the Southern Illinois-based shop had going on. Maverick Diesel offers custom tuning, performance parts and upgrades, fabrication work and engine assembly; the shop was opened in 2016 by owner Paul Cato.

Paul graciously offered to show us a truck and engine setup they’ve had for a few years, which had recently gone through a refresh.

“This engine isn’t new, and we’ve been running it since around 2021,” Cato told us. “Last year, we started to make some passes with it and ended up having a tappet failure that got into the actual bore of the block, so we basically took last year off and did a whole revamp and redid everything.”