Photo courtesy of Speed of Air Engine Technologies

LS engines making 3,000 horsepower. Diesel pulling engines making more than 5,000 hp. Endurance race engines that withstand excessive heat and pressure for hours at a time. These are just a few examples of race applications that have challenged piston and ring manufacturers. 

“Power levels and cylinder pressures just keep increasing,” noted Rick (RC) Canning of CP-Carrillo, Irvine, California. “Not everyone’s doing 9.5:1 compression on gasoline. It’s E85, or alcohol, and they want 10.5 or 11:1 stack compression, and they want to put 40 pounds of boost to it. So you have to make the part really stout.”

“We are constantly pushing this stuff to extremes,” added Keith Jones of Total Seal, Phoenix, Arizona. “Think about what an LS engine is capable of. Could we have made a production small block Chevy do that in 1975? No. All the material and technologies are better now. The coating technologies and ring technologies are better. Engine management, the big one, is better. That makes us change how we think about all the other processes.”

We asked these and other piston and ring manufacturers to talk about some of the wilder, more outrageous designs they’ve come up with to produce today’s power levels. In some cases, we bumped up against confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. But even then our sources provided solid information on their theories behind custom piston and ring designs as well as trends they see in the marketplace...

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