LS-swapped Porsche Gets Too Tipsy on the Bottle, Catches Fire
Poor Porsche 911 blows up after pushing the limits of a Cadillac V8 with a healthy dose of nitrous oxide.
LS-swapping is the quintessential mark of a Chevy enthusiast. The community has given nearly every car brand under the sun an Chevy heartbeat, so if you ever decide to jump in the fray, you’ve got a wealth of knowledge to draw from. And a lot of ways to make big amounts of power on the cheap.
However, power chasing doesn’t come without inherent risk. Take this blue 2000 Porsche 911 that YouTuber Christian McMaster featured on his channel.
The owner, Josh Kiefer, took out the 206 cubic-inch flat-six and replaced it with a 6.0-liter LQ9 V8 from a Cadillac Escalade. It’s naturally-aspirated, rocking custom heads, cam, and a 92mm intake but still has its stock six-speed transmission. It also has a secret weapon: 200-shot nitrous oxide.
“I dyno’d it 430, but on the bottle, I imagine it does around 600,” said Kiefer
LQ9 (also known as Vortec engines) are LS-based GM motors that share a lot of the LS platform’s internals. So while it technically is in a different class, it is essentially an LS. Now these motors typically respond quite well to top and bottom end performance mods such as turbos, blowers, cylinder heads, intakes, cams, and even nitrous. So what’s the deal here?
As you can probably imagine, this Porsche gets driven hard pretty much all the time. “Definitely not a garage queen. I race this thing quite often,” he said. “It’s made to be used and abused. That’s what a car is for, right?”
McMaster and Kiefer meet at an undisclosed location to take the LS-powered convertible for some spirited sprinting on the street.
“A lot of people hate convertibles, but I always drive with the top down,” Kiefer said. McMaster concurs, and tells him how he loves to drive his Miata on beautiful afternoons like this. “I just don’t know how people don’t like convertibles.”
Without further ado, they begin banging through the gears. You would think that low pro tires on such big wheels would equal a lot of trips to spin city. However, thanks to the added weight of the LQ9, the tires hook more often than not.
Kiefer then comes up to a turn where he then takes the grand opportunity to give the engine a healthy spray of nitrous. He then comes to a stop, does a magnificent launch from a dig, and promptly breaks his shifter during a hard shift to second. Of course, that’s a big enough sign to abort mission and try a juiced-up launch from a dig on another day, which he wisely does. And after a quick fix, they go for round two the next day.
What happens next is simply the motor gods kicking a man while he’s down. After finding a clear patch of road, McMaster asks Kiefer if he wants to do a pull with or without nitrous. Kiefer decides to go the NO2 route, hooks from a dig, then watches in horror as he sees his engine billowing smoke and shooting flames from the rearview mirror.
After dispatching the flame with an emergency extinguisher, McMaster got a couple of his friends to tow the poor Porsche back their shop, where they discovered a 7-inch hole blown on the side of the block. Which means, of course, bye-bye motor.
It’s a sad sight to see, but the greatest aspect of the LS community is that you can get a short block for relatively cheap, as well as a plethora of affordable parts and simply start over. We highly suspect Kiefer will want to lay off the bottle somewhat on his next build, though.
Join the LS1Tech forums now!
