You’ve heard the saying “go big or go home” before but no one takes it quite as literally as automotive enthusiast Mike Harrah [1]. This automotive visionary, developer and philanthropist is well known for his enormously successful California development company Caribou Industries Inc. and massive charitable contributions around Orange County giving back to the kids and the community, but he also goes big when it comes to the vehicles and engines he builds.
[2]Even here in it’s build stage, the Big Mike V24 is an impressive piece of work.
Of course there are some extremely large engines out there but nothing we’ve seen has shocked and awed as much as Harrah’s V24-71 Detroit Diesel “Big Mike” engine. This brute of a semi engine is rated at over 3,000hp and makes use of 12 (yes, you read that right) 871 blowers and nitrous to get the job done.
The Big Mike V24 diesel engine has been around for a couple years, but there is just no getting tired of this video. Harrah, in all his enthusiasm, introduces the engine as the largest ever built for a semi truck and we’d believe it.
With a dozen blowers, 36 butterflies, 24 cylinders thanks to two V12 Detroit Diesel engines matted together with splined cranks, and the guts to pull it all together, this engine dynos at an astonishing 3,424hp. It may not be a hot rod or for one, but this engine is a custom builder’s dream!
So what do you do with an engine this size? Well, you put it in a custom built show semi of course and that’s exactly what Harrah did. The engine is now matted to an Allison transmission inside a custom 359 Peterbilt truck with a massive 40-foot long custom chassis to hold it all together. What do you think the turning radius of that is?
[3]