With a focus on high-performance powerplants for traditional hot rods, circle track racing, and the drag strip, this family owned and operated custom shop specializes in the development and production of hardcore speed parts that aren’t available elsewhere. Their engineering expertise keeps Nostalgia racers coming back for more.

By the early 1970s, Ross Lombardi had decided that he was done dealing with substandard workmanship. After years of competing in Oldsmobiles at drag strips in and around Ohio, Lombardi had become known for developing his own race-winning powerplants. That reputation had earned him enough of a following at the track and on the street to start a fledging operation behind his home.

“He just couldn’t get the work done the way he wanted it, so initially he started buying equipment for his own use,” said Ross’s son, Tony Lombardi, who has overseen the day-to-day operations at Ross Racing Engines since 2010. “That was basically the shop’s inception. Not long after that he started doing work for other racers, and suddenly it was a full-time job.”

Now operating out of a 4,000-square-foot facility in Niles, Ohio, Ross Racing Engines has evolved into a true custom shop, building high-performance engines for everything from NHRA dragsters and Super Late Model circle track cars to vintage street machines and boats. The common thread, as Tony explained, has always been the demand for something above and beyond the norm.

“We’ve always worked on a wide range of engines, and we’ve never shied away from developing our own solutions. When my dad started this shop, he was racing Chevrolets, but prior to that he was racing early Oldsmobiles—when I say early, I’m talking the stuff from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. In the mid-1990s when we started to restore his ’49 Club Coupe, we noticed that you just couldn’t find anything for those types of vintage engines. As racers tend to do, we decided that if we couldn’t buy something, we’d just make it instead. So we started to dabble with manufacturing parts, and it just kind of snowballed from there.”

Creating A Niche

While Ross Racing Engines has always worked on a diverse range of projects, over time the shop has increasingly gravitated toward the nostalgia market. The Lombardis’ deep well of knowledge about early high-performance engines certainly contributed to that, but Lombardi said that other factors came into play as well.

“I ran Super Late Model on dirt for nearly 25 years, but when I took on a larger role at the shop in 2010, I decided to go drag racing instead,” he explained. “Stock car racing is like another full-time job, and it just wasn’t feasible to run the shop and do that at the same time. But I wanted to keep racing, and I wanted to do something with my dad—his heart has always been in the drag race world.”

Around that same time, the global recession was wreaking havoc on the racing efforts of competitors across virtually all motorsports disciplines, but the younger Lombardi noticed that a few segments were largely immune to economic fluctuations. “The Saturday night guys and racers like that got wounded pretty badly, so we started playing around with a lot more vintage engines at that point,” he said. “At the end of the day, that type of customer just isn’t as affected by those kinds of shifts.”

That led Ross Racing Engines to become a go-to shop not only for vintage racers, but also discerning enthusiasts of traditional hot rods. “It was something we were already doing here and there, but it became a greater focus for us at that point,” he added. “These types of hot rod builds tend to be a little more hardcore, and they have hardcore engines to match. A lot of the clientele are ex-racers who know what they want and what they’re getting into. These are folks who’re a little bit older and now have the means to play around with the cars that they wanted when they were kids.”

For decades, Ross Racing Engines has been a dealer for high-end engine components from the likes of Brodix, Crower, and Diamond Pistons; over time, the shop has also fleshed out its own product line to address gaps in the market. “We build stuff like early Hemis, early Oldsmobiles, the Buick Nailheads, and the early OHV Cadillac V8s, and when you get into vintage engines like these, there are some items you just can’t find,” Lombardi said. “So about 15 years ago, we came out with a cylinder head for the early Olds engines. Not long after that we did a roller rocker setup for them, and now we do stroker crankshafts, H-beam rods, forged pistons, hydraulic roller setups, solid roller cams; the list goes on. You can now build an early Olds engine just like you’re building a small block Chevy without using anything from General Motors.”

Lombardi also noted that the shop doesn’t sell partial engines, and while many of these builds are destined for motorsports use, there’s a strong focus on creating combinations that can deliver long-term reliability. “While we sell parts, all of our engines go out the door after they’ve been on the dyno—everything is turnkey. It’s all built to be driven, so longevity is a priority for us. For example, I’ve got a blown 371 Olds in my Model A with about 50,000 miles on it now. We annually drive from here in Ohio to my buddy’s shop in Austin, Texas. It’s a 3,600-mile round trip, and that engine has done the trip six times.”

Ross Racing Engines’ manufacturing endeavors also span into other aspects of vintage powertrains. “We do some transmission adapters and things like that,” Lombardi said. “With a lot of these engines, there’s no way to put a modern transmission behind them. We CNC out a lot of parts, so we decided to develop a nice package that would help to make these engines a little more user-friendly.”

The shop has a CNC cylinder hone, four-axis milling machines, and other specialized equipment that allows them to do the vast majority of this work in-house. “We’re pretty self-sufficient, and we’ve always helped out other local shops with jobs that are beyond their capability. At this point the only thing we don’t do here is heat-treating.”

While Lombardi uses Facebook and Instagram to get the word out about what projects the shop is working on, he told us that the shop’s following has traditionally come from word-of-mouth recommendations. He also said that their close proximity to a number of different race tracks helps the shop maintain a presence at a variety of different events. “This part of Ohio is kind of a hub. We can race stock cars on pavement or dirt three nights a week within about a hundred-mile radius of here. There’s also two sports car courses within an hour and a half of here. And as far as drag strips, well, we’ve got two that are less than an hour from here, and another two that are less than two hours from here.”

Those drag strips provide Lombardi with ample opportunity to showcase what his Olds-powered front-engine dragster is capable of, a car he’s been campaigning in the Nostalgia Drag Racing League’s Pro 7.0 class since 2015. “It’s the quickest and fastest early Olds out here. We’ve been in the 6.60s at 204 mph with it, which is pretty damn good for that type of motor,” he noted. “When I decided I was going to go drag racing, I initially planned to build an AA Gas car or something like that. But I realized that once you shut the hood on a Willys, you don’t really know what’s powering it. We had put together this really cool hand-built motor, so I decided to go with a dragster because that would allow it to be out in the open where people could see it.”

The Hands-On Approach

Back in 2008, Ross Racing Engines had roughly half a dozen employees, but these days it’s a simpler operation. “My dad still comes in every day, so there’s one other employee,” he quipped. “Over time folks moved on to other things, and we just never replaced them.”

He said that it can be tough to find good people, and sometimes it can be more of a hassle than it’s worth. “What my dad did and what I’ve tried to do in the past is find people that we’d like to train. We didn’t want to bring in someone else’s bad habits, and we tend to be picky about how we want things done.”

That’s led to a workload that keeps Lombardi at the shop seven days a week when he’s not at the races, but he expects equipment upgrades, like the shop’s forthcoming five-axis CNC machine, to improve production efficiencies while also expanding their capabilities. “When you’re trying to do things like ‘drive around a corner’ in an intake port, you really need to have a five-axis machine.”

The Lombardis’ commitment to their products has led customers like Bob Hilton—a former nitro drag racer who now campaigns a Top Fuel dragster in the NHRA Heritage Series with his son Tyler at the helm—to rely on Ross Racing Engines to keep the team’s engine program ahead of the competition.

“We build a lot of traditional hot rods as well, so we originally got hooked up with Ross Racing Engines through that, and then the drag racing stuff came later,” Hilton said. “Tony works one-on-one with his customers, and the results are phenomenal. These days, any time our car goes to the races, he comes along with us. Honestly, I don’t think I could run it without him.”