Ted Hughes is accustomed to seeing engines built in record speed. His company hosts an annual engine builders competition where a couple of men typically can build a piece in about 18 to 20 minutes.

If only the process were that simple for NASCAR's top manufacturers who toil for years between the lab and race track perfecting the right design, then spend even greater amounts of time prototyping, building and testing the final product.

From start to finish the development process can take three to five years, leaving engine builders like Doug Yates to camp out in his shop, causing engineers like GM Racing's Jim Covey to have nightmares about missing bolts and forcing engine tuners like Mike Messick, waiting for a cylinder head, to stalk the UPS man like a kid to the ice cream truck. It's all in the name of competition; keeping up with it and hopefully making a gain.

But if the engine builders in Hughes's friendly competition can do it in less than 20 minutes, why did it take Chevrolet decades to build a new one? Why did it also take Ford an eternity? You can go ahead and add Dodge while you're at it.

Those familiar with the history of NASCAR know that's a derisive, asinine question, but one nevertheless deserving of an answer.

"The answer is simple," said Hughes, team leader at Mahle-Clevite Inc., which sponsors the annual competition and also supplies gaskets, bearings and pistons to all NASCAR teams.

"The parts and pieces were already there for our competitors, so it was like building a puzzle, whereas what someone like Doug Yates does is basically take a picture of the engine, mount it on cardboard, cut it to pieces and then put it back together."

You could say it's like comparing camshafts to carburetors. The competitors in the showdown have everything they need in a timely manner laid out on a table beside them for a Chevrolet or a Ford engine depending on what they choose to build.

“

We initiated talks with NASCAR and when Toyota came in and kind of leapfrogged everybody then we said, 'Hey, when is our turn?'

”

-- DOUG YATES

Today's teams and manufacturers start from scratch on a computer screen in Michigan and end in the engine shops of North Carolina. It's this way because the technological evolution -- from production-based blocks consumers are familiar with to the first purpose-built race engines used today -- has drastically changed the way teams and manufacturers build engines.

NASCAR engine builders primarily take something that exists and make it run better. Now they have opportunity to make something from scratch.

The process has evolved into a highly sophisticated, timely and expensive process. Back in the 1950s and 60s, teams merely went to the local dealership to pick up their engine or they simply drove a car off the lot. The only modifying they did was weld the doors shut and add a roll cage.

Engines today are works of art created from what engineers describe as "clean sheet of paper" and they require far more man-hours than the lone engine builder was able to offer back in the day.

Toyota had the first swing at it when they entered the Cup Series in 2007. They didn't have the equivalent of a production-based engine like the other manufacturers to start from, so they were allowed to start from scratch with a radical new design.

Ford, with its FR9, is the last of the Big Three to roll out its first version of the purpose-built race engine -- following Chevrolet in 2007 and then Dodge in 2008 -- a process that has taken nearly three years from concept to race car.

"We initiated talks with NASCAR and when Toyota came in and kind of leapfrogged everybody then we said, 'Hey, when is our turn?'" said Doug Yates, president of Roush Yates Racing Engines. "They gave us a couple of options. At first they said we could do a new block but not a new head or you could do a new head for your old block so there was a little start and stop and then NASCAR zeroed in on their rules box. That is when we went full steam ahead."

The rule box implemented by NASCAR was a result of Toyota's new engine that later would have to be scaled back. The rules, procedures and approval process were NASCAR's way of putting all the engines in one box, creating equal opportunity for all.

Still technology and time have evolved the process to where the majority of NASCAR mechanics have been replaced with engineers and it takes roughly 40 hours to build one of these engines and each costs on average $75,000. And guess how many engines each team will take to the track any given weekend? The answer is three -- a backup engine and a backup to the backup -- so do the math.

Measures are continuously taken by NASCAR to control costs, but in the ultra-competitive Cup Series, teams spend more time and money today than they ever have despite the sanctioning body's best efforts.

"Finding advantages today is 10 times harder and we are spending more money and are more diligent than we ever have been in history," said Lee White, president and general manager of Toyota Racing Development. "The motivation and rewards are so great to win you can't control what teams will spend. People are going overseas to find advances in technology. Right now there is nothing happening in Formula One that isn't happening in NASCAR."

Part of the reason White said teams are working so hard is because the parameters and rules set by NASCAR where engines are concerned is slightly constraining.

"We are racing in what is called the box and it is a closely controlled entity in every regard and you can't deviate," he added.

This "box" sets the boundaries for specific design features and minimum and maximum dimensions for key engine components.

Some view it as a double-edged sword.

"The process is just trying to optimize within that box," said Jim Covey, NASCAR engine technical manager for GM Racing. "If there were no limits we would do something different. From NASCAR's standpoint, this is great because everyone has the same opportunity.

"That to me is one of the best things: It took all of the politics out of it. We had the same opportunity everyone else had. When it's all said and done, if our engines aren't better than our competitors, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We had the same opportunity to design in the same parameters."

And so begins the process with the understanding that designing, building and rolling out a new engine in NASCAR is more than just picking up the piece at the local dealership.

Getty Images

Visitors to the NASCAR Hall of Fame can see the finished product, but it takes years to reach that point.

Starting the process

While most people prefer to have photos of family on their desktops, Covey has something more cold and shiny.

"I've got pictures of the engine, it's my baby," said the GM engineer who was named the 2007 Race Engine Designer of the Year for his efforts in overseeing the development of the new Chevrolet R07 engine that debuted in the Cup Series the same year.

The engine was a long time coming, considering plans for a new block really never stopped after the original stalwart production-based SB2 V8 was approved back in 1998. Covey and GM Racing just had to find the right time to submit a plan to NASCAR and get it approved.

"The R99 ... that one never made it," Covey said. "We thought in 2003 after Dodge came back into the sport we could go for it that time, but NASCAR didn't feel it was appropriate because we were winning a lot of races. Dodge took the parameters from all small blocks to more of an optimized engine so knowing that we said 'OK lets go to work on the R05,' and when Toyota came they never had a production based push-rod V8 engine so for them it was a clean sheet of paper, they could do whatever they did. We saw what they did and had to equal that."

NASCAR encourages the show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine mentality to maintain parity in the playing field.

Chevrolet found the appropriate time and went to work on submitting plans to NASCAR, which ultimately weren't approved until a year later.

The work began in Detroit but it didn't stay there, Covey said. GM Racing worked closely with its teams.

"From the first day, everything was laid out for our teams to be involved," he said. "That has given us an advantage because, in the end, the teams are the ones who have to build the engine. We just supply them the parts and they put them together and massage them to assemble the engines."

Once they had a submission both the teams and GM Racing felt comfortable with, both were able to submit to NASCAR. But to get to this point was likely the hardest part of the process.

In 2005 when Chevrolet started designing the R07, they had four different primary teams and each was building its own engines: Joe Gibbs Racing, Dale Earnhardt Inc., Richard Childress Racing and Hendrick Motorsports. That was unlike Ford, which worked with only one engine building operation: Roush Yates Racing Engines.

Covey said, "That meant four different opinions, which made the engine as good as possible but also offered too many different answers and ideas of how the engine should be."

It boiled down to two primary designs with the four teams split down the middle leaving GM Racing to ultimately pick one.

"And at some point you have to shoot the engineer," Covey laughed. "Because we will just keep coming up with new ideas and we'll never get to the race track."

A then-Roush Racing employee took an up-close look at the engine in the spring of 2007.

Ready for Approval

Ford took 10 months to design plans for NASCAR's approval process and they described that as an "accelerated design phase" but no detail can be overlooked when you're trying to find the balance of creating tremendous horsepower and durability in one engine package.

The same attitude holds true for Dodge, whose original blank sheet engine design proposal, R5, required an evolutionary design of the cylinder head and experienced weight issues.

"Robustness and durability of the R5P7 engine came with a weight penalty, which was addressed in the new R6P8 engine design," said Pat Baer of Dodge Motorsports Engine Engineering. "Every opportunity to reduce weight, improve cooling and meet the new NASCAR regulations was taken with the new R6P8 engine design. Virtual design reviews were conducted with each team weekly, as the engine quickly progressed from math models to tooling to cast and machined components."

As a result, the new R6 was 20 pounds lighter than the R5 and had a modest torque improvement.

It pays to be precise and once the perfect formula is discovered, the teams are ready for John Darby, NASCAR's managing director of competition. And much like the engine process, he said the approval process is 180 degrees different from what it was 20 years ago as well.

Prior to the box, when a manufacturer decided they wanted to develop a new cylinder head, for example, they just developed a new cylinder head and distributed to the teams and went on their way, Darby explained.

However, NASCAR's biggest responsibility now is parity in competition, keeping everybody with the same opportunity.

"Over the years we've defined what I'm going to call is a box. If you related it to building a house, for example, all the manufacturers are given the blueprints for a house, this wide, this tall, and have this kind of roof on it," Darby said. "For decorating purposes, if you want to paint your walls blue instead of green, we're OK with all that so there is still some flexibility for the manufacturer to hold their own identities and apply their engineering efforts as they choose. Our blueprints surround more of what we know can be a competitive advantage or things that we've learned over the years that just don't work."

The manufacturers and NASCAR have a general idea of what is going to work from the engine block, cylinder heads and intake manifolds. But the manufacturers' engineers submit computer-aided drafting files to NASCAR's engineers, and the conversations and planning begin.

"We study those for a while and give them either a green or red light. As long as they keep getting green lights, they continue to work and develop new parts and pieces," Darby said.

Getty Images

Workers tend to an engine in front of Marcos Ambrose's Cup car in June 2009.

Red Lights

For Chevrolet, their red light came in 2003.

"The first red light we hit was basically the concept before the engine (R07) got approved," said Pat Suhy, GM Racing's NASCAR group manager. "We submitted it in 2003 when Toyota was coming into the truck series and we knew they were coming with an all new dedicated race engine whereas all the other manufacturers -- the Big Three -- our engines all traced their roots back to our production stuff from the middle 1950s and 60s really. You could look at one of ours and say, 'Oh yeah, that's a Chevy,' because you always knew what a Chevy small block looked like.

"The good thing about NASCAR is they don't keep all that under wraps. We basically saw the Toyota engine at Daytona in 2004 when they started racing it. Got to understand what they had done and brought an engine with no production roots purely purposed for racing. We knew right then our engine was still a small block engine. We knew we had to move it up a notch. I would say between 2003 and 2006 we worked from a clean sheet of paper knowing that Toyota got to do that."

Still, Suhy added, the hardest thing was getting everyone to throw away the old piece of paper.

In 2007, GM Racing finally got the call from NASCAR approving their new R07 engine the same way Dodge did in 2008 and Ford in 2009.

"The phone call went to Pat Suhy from NASCAR," Covey recalled. "We submitted parts in 2006 and we had been trying for so long I didn't want to get my hopes up. Looking back we technically hadn't pushed until we saw what Toyota was able to do because we never thought NASCAR would approve it."

“

Finding advantages today is 10 times harder and we are spending more money and are more diligent than we ever have been in history.

”

-- LEE WHITE

Parts in parcel

When Covey's design was approved, his first emotion was elation that quickly turned to anxiety.

"I hoped it was as good as we think it is," he said. "We had to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, 'Did we miss? Now that it is approved, how do we start manufacturing parts and get ready to race?'"

That is where the real fun begins for the engine shops. Parts and more parts, supplies and "Do we have enough?"

"If you only had one team, you could do 10 cylinder heads," Covey said. "But at that time Chevrolet had four major teams competing against each other and there were an average of three cars for each team. When parts started coming in, it was difficult to say, 'OK, we are getting in five blocks a week.' Well, who do you give them to without showing favorites and things?"

Eventually you fill the pipeline and catch up, but not having enough parts is a builder's biggest fear and trying to be equitable is an ongoing challenge.

"We had a little bit of that in the past when we had cylinder head updates," Yates recalled. "When we went to the All-Star Race four or five years ago some of the guys had the new cylinder head and some had the old. Unfortunately they happen to wreck each other on the front straightaway. That was bad, but you try to be as fair as possible because every team is important. It doesn't matter if they're first in points or 25th in points."

Supplies and parts is what kept Covey up at night.

"There are hundreds of parts to an engine but my nightmare was that we forgot the 50 cent bolt," he said. "Someone goes to assemble the engine and the bolt is not there, that was my biggest fear."

Yates agreed.

"You work with suppliers on the front end and say, 'Here is our design, can you make it?" Yates said. "They say, 'Yes' and then once you run it and start validating things they say, 'whoops' they can't make it. Those are some of the things that keep you up at night. Not just the performance of the engine but structurally. Fortunately we have 170 employees at the shop and everybody has worked round the clock, seven days a week, whatever it takes, to get this engine to the track."

No one knows this better than Mike Messick, engine tuner and trackside manager for Roush Yates Racing Engines.

Like when the teams were building for old and new generation cars before the switch, Messick compared that to him tuning old 452s and the new FR9, which can triple the workload.

He works 12-hour days Monday through Wednesday and is at the track overseeing the engines for nine different teams.

"I'm out every day racing the UPS truck waiting to see what supplies or parts come," Messick said. "Did we get more pieces today or not?"

A mechanic by trade promoted to tuner, Messick said you can rebuild an engine in about four or five days if you have all the parts, but a new one is a different story.

"You have 20 hours of machine work in the block," he said. "Then you have machine work in the heads. And new parts for an engine typically take two weeks to show up, that is if everything goes well."

Testing time

Testing the engine is the last step that takes the engine from the simulated environment to the real racing environment on Sunday. It's long, important and costly.

"The race teams spend time working on all the machined parts, run them until they blow up and try to figure out why they blew up and go back and fix the weak link and continue," Darby said. "When they're satisfied with the pieces and think they are ready for competition, then we'll go ahead and install those part numbers of those pieces into the NASCAR rule book. From there, competitors are free to build and use the engines."

At Roush Yates Racing Engines in Mooresville, N.C., they have a dynamometer.

"It is important for everyone to understand that the dynamometer simulates races at any race track in the world and I would say we probably have about 50 races on that dynamometer with this new engine so we have a lot of confidence," Yates said. "We know the strong points and weak points. Having that tool has given us a lot of confidence, unlike 10 years ago where you went to the race track and hoped for the best."

Until you have that confidence, teams and manufacturers don't want to show up at the race track and risk a DNF (did not finish), despite pressures and public perceptions.

"Last year after the second Michigan race, NASCAR took one of all the engines in the field, Toyota, Dodge, Chevrolet and Ford, and dynoed all of them," Yates said. "Our old engine, the 452, had the most power in the whole field. We felt like that bought us some time so when we rolled out the new engine it would be better than the old engine. Jack Roush and I and Ford sat down and discussed that, and we felt like we were still competitive. So when we rolled it out, we could be 100 percent reliable and make more power than the old engine."

Hughes said the margin for error is so small, truly the difference between blowing up and winning a race is razor thin. Everything must be measured to the thousandth or ten-thousandth of an inch.

"Not like the engine builders showdown where our guys are building an engine to run for one minute. The engines at the track, they set their standards at 1,000 miles per weekend which includes practice laps, qualifying and race day," Hughes said.

Toyota Racing Development employees get to work on one of the team's engines in Feb. 2009.

Roll out

It's a Friday morning in June and practice has begun at Michigan International Speedway.

Yates is standing by the start-finish line. It's the first weekend his new FR9 engines are in all of the Ford cars: Roush Fenway Racing, Richard Petty Motorsports and Wood Brothers Racing.

"I kind of listen to them come by and listen to the tone compared to my competitors," he said. "You can always tell, if you're an engine guy, if you're running well. The engine sounds sharp."

The engines were sharp across the board that weekend and Ford driver Kasey Kahne produced a runner-up finish, the same driver who won one of the All-Star qualifying events in May with the new FR9 engine.

Yates' optimistic feelings, despite a few ongoing issues with supplies and simulation that will eventually work themselves out, is the same feeling Suhy and Covey felt in 2007 when the R07 won its first points race -- the Coca Cola 600 with Casey Mears.

"That kind of validates all the work you put in. We never had issues, no fundamental issue with the design," Covey said. "The teams have made improvements in the way they port the cylinder heads and modify intake manifolds and do the camshafts but the fundamental design is sound."

One might think Covey and the others now have time to take a breath, perhaps enjoy their success. But in NASCAR there's no time to rest on your laurels.

Designs and prototype parts for the next great engine are continually being hammered on. And though they will likely change six ways from Sunday before they reach NASCAR's desk, the competition forces them to keep innovating, keep tweaking.

So the work and evolution is constant because, as Yates so candidly puts it, "you don't call it, 'Gentlemen, start your bump stops' and it's always the engine that crosses the finish line first."