The 1100 HP Twin-Turbo LSX Lexus IS300 is an Asian-American Dragster

What do you do when you find a crack in the block of your race car just weeks before a race? Swap in a new one and build it out, duh. That’s what happened to Dedicated Motorsports (DM) when its techs were taking the heads off to put high-flow heads on this 2002 Lexus IS300. Despite showing no signs of damage, the block indeed had a crack in it. So, DM pulled that one out and put a new 5.3-liter LSX engine into it with only a few weeks to work with.

The event that was coming up was TX2K16 on March 17-20 at Royal Purple Raceway in Houston, so the car had to be in top shape. The first thing DM did was put in a pair of Xona Rotor 95/67 ball bearing turbochargers. That’s set up with a MoTec boost control valve and is set to 25 pounds of boost. That gives it 1,138 horsepower. There are plans to push that up to 30 pounds to try to get to the 1,300s.

So how’d it do? Well, as you can see in the video, it had a ton of runs and is an absolute handful with that front end lifting up. The best run came up as a red-hot 8.76 (and destroyed an EVO), after multiple runs in the nines.

As the kids are saying these days … it goes down in the DM.

[Via 1320 Video]