Following a long family history of racing success going back to the 1960s, Holbrook Racing Engines has earned its place among the great engine builders by coaxing remarkable power from Ford Coyotes and other popular engines.

Chris Holbrook is clearly in his element. Despite the whirlwind of activity that whips through his shop every day, he speaks on the phone with a relaxed, easygoing manner that sounds more like someone at a picnic.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. He’s been around racing and engine building literally his whole life. When asked if there’s an engine combination he’s built that seems “unusual,” he struggles to come up with an answer. He’s pretty much seen it all, built it for racing and dyno’d it to glorious power figures. 

Holbrook is a racer to the core. He learned by watching his dad, Carl, ply his trade in a long string of successful Super Stock drag cars. Eventually, Carl Holbrook opened an engine shop, serving a wide array of race and street customers. 

Chris followed in his father’s footsteps, rising through the ranks of drag competition, eventually winning the 1999 IHRA Pro Stock championship. Shortly after that accomplishment, “around 2005,” he launched Holbrook Racing Engines, building engines that continue to power his customers into the winner’s circle year after year. 

The Blue Oval Connection

Located in Livonia, Michigan, Holbrook Racing Engines is about a 45-minute drive from Milan Dragway and some two hours from Summit Motorsports Park and US 131 Motorsports Park.

Just as significant, the shop is also a short ride from Ford Motor Company’s Dearborn headquarters. The Blue Oval brand has always held a prominent place in the Holbrook family’s efforts. “I think from my Dad and me running Ford products all our lives, that’s where the relationship started.” 

In 1968, his father bought a Mustang Cobra Jet and began racking up a potent string of records, wins, and championships in NHRA Super Stock, earning him the nickname, “Captain Cobra Jet.”

Today, Chris proudly carries on that legacy. In 2013 he teamed with Watson Racing to campaign a 2013 Mustang Cobra Jet, culminating in a win at the NHRA Nationals in Indianapolis. The following year, he backed up that success with a 2014 CJ that won that year’s NHRA Best Engineering award. 

Through these efforts, Holbrook gained valuable information on the Coyote V8 Mustang, what it’s capable of, and what it takes to win races with it—wisdom he gladly passes on to customers. 

Recently, Holbrook began campaigning a 2000 Mustang. “This is our first year out with the car, so we’re still getting used to it,” he said. “It’s in an eighth-mile class, and 4.52 has been our fastest ET. We actually set the speed record for NMCA at 161 and change.”

Besides its record-setting performance, his latest car has another thing in common with his previous Mustangs: Coyote V8 power. With the on-track experience he’s gained with this engine, his shop has become the go-to for racers looking for an edge with it. 

Accordingly, Holbrook said the Whipple-supercharged Coyote V8 has become the shop’s bread-and-butter engine combination, making up a large percentage of the jobs they’re working on at any given time. 

“I think the Ford Coyote is a growing market in general,” said Holbrook. “But it’s also been coming our way because we ran a lot of the NHRA Factory Stock Showdown. Our team and some customers did quite well with it. Now we’re kind of switching over into NMCA and NMRA and running some of their classes with the Ford Coyote engine, and we’re again doing well. So our business is just following that.”

Holbrook also handles warranty work on Ford’s crate engines. “If the customer has an issue, the engine comes here,” he said. “We take it apart, and then Ford engineers come over and evaluate everything to determine if it’s the customer’s fault, something wrong with a part or an assembly error.”

Even with these strong connections to Ford products, Holbrook doesn’t have an exclusive relationship with the Blue Oval brand. At any given time in his shop, there are plenty of other street and race engines being carted around, waiting for the Holbrook magic. “We’ll do an LS engine for the street, a Coyote for the street, a small block Ford, small block Chevy, big block. We do a wide variety,” he explained. 

Engine Central

For the amount of work that goes through Holbrook’s shop, one might expect the facility to be something more monumental. Granted, at roughly 7,000 square feet, the brick-faced industrial building Holbrook and his team work out of isn’t a tiny corner garage. But then Holbrook casually mentioned how much he and his crew work on day after day, year after year: “There are about 50 to 70 engines in our shop at any given time. We’re definitely out of space.”

To do the work, Holbrook and his crew rely on proven equipment they’ve used for years. “For honing, we use a Sunnen hone with diamond stones, and we have a Sunnen line hone,” he said. “Then we have a Serdi head-seat machine and an RMC machine that does the block work.” 

While many shops are making the leap into CNC equipment, Holbrook has taken a more conservative approach, sticking with what he knows best. That said, he doesn’t rule out switching to CNC. “We definitely want to get into more of the CNC stuff,” he said. “Matter of fact, my son is taking CNC machining in college right now, so hopefully our plan is to get more CNC equipment.”

The most important piece of equipment in the shop just might be the SuperFlow engine dynamometer, which is in almost constant use. “If we build a complete engine, I always push to put it on the dyno,” said Holbrook. “And we have some outsource customers who bring their engines in, and we dyno and tune them.” 

Power People

Like any other proven business, the success of Holbrook Racing Engines largely comes down to the people doing the work every day. For that, Holbrook relies on a lean staff of dedicated pros.

Holbrook runs the day-to-day business, with administrative help from his wife, Holly. Out in the shop, he relies on a mix of specialists and generalists. “There are a couple of guys who do whatever needs to be done, one guy who does a lot of the block machining and cylinder-head work, and then we have two guys who do a lot of the assembly.”

Despite the relatively small headcount and the high volume of work going through the shop, Holbrook’s crew enjoys a pretty standard 8-to-5 workday, with three or four extra hours on some Saturdays. 

Holbrook learned a long list of things from his dad, but his methods of supervising people aren’t among them. Instead, he developed his own, lighter touch for motivating and managing his team. “I grew up working for my dad, and I loved him to death,” he recalled. “But if you were one minute late punching in, he reamed you. And lunch was from this time to this time—or else. I don’t want to be that strict. I try not to burn my crew out.

“We have a good time here,” he added. “A happy, fun shop is a good running shop. If everybody’s pissed off at the boss, it just doesn’t help productivity.”

Holbrook’s emphasis on keeping things light has paid dividends in terms of retention, a necessity in an industry that depends heavily on a limited pool of specialized craftsmen. “It’s a tough business,” he admitted. Because fewer and fewer people are taking up the trade, “you’ve got to keep the people you have who are good and give them something to work for. One guy has been with me pretty much since I opened. The other ones have been here eight to 10 years.”

The Business of Racing Engines

With nearly two decades in business, and a highly visible racing program of its own, Holbrook Racing Engines is well established in motorsports, particularly in drag racing. This gives the business the luxury of a steady demand year in and year out. “We get our customers mostly by word of mouth,” explained Holbrook. “A lot of that is because of our racing program. It goes back to that old saying, ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.’” 

To augment the publicity from racing, Holbrook Racing Engines is the presenting sponsor of the NMCA Muscle Car Mayhem in Bradenton, Florida. Other than that, Holbrook professes to do little or no actual marketing for his business. The same goes for his online promotional activities, which for the most part get lost in the ongoing hustle of getting work through the shop and into customers’ hands. 

“We need to do more online marketing,” said Holbrook. “But to be honest with you, we’re always so busy. We just don’t have time for that. You just do the day-to-day things, and that other stuff gets forgotten.”

There’s an even more urgent problem facing his business: parts shortages brought on by the pandemic. “I spend my days chasing down parts, wondering how to get them and asking how fast we can get them,” he said. “We’ve got jobs waiting.”

Amid these challenges, he’s grooming the next generation of his family to play a role in the Holbrook legacy. In particular, his son Del is taking an active role in the shop and its racing endeavors. The 18-year-old just graduated high school and is jumping full-force into the action. 

Besides studying CNC programming and trying his hand at race-track photography, Del pilots a recently built Ford Mustang with a naturally aspirated Coyote engine, competing in NMRA and NMCA Open Comp. “We’re getting his feet wet in it before we get into heads-up racing,” said Holbrook.

With a past full of accomplishments, a shop full of work and a family that keeps involved in all of it, Chris Holbrook is in an enviable position. While he continues to enjoy the fruits of his labor, racers throughout the country put his engines to work setting records, pummeling competition and pushing the boundaries of drag performance.