To followup on what some of the others have talked about...

The higher dollar engines you are talking about are somewhere in the 375-390 hp range depending on what dyno they run on. Every dyno is different in terms of the actual number but you can compare the torque and hp curves to show differences in engines.

Following up to what paul said... YES, you can run a midget engine 15-20 short track shows without having many issues. However, the engines that you can do this with are only making about 300-325 horsepower and are lower compression in some cases. When you branch out and start to run larger tracks like 1/2 and 1 mile you walk a fine line of reliability and risk catastrophic failure.
I think the reason (or the reason why we do it) why guys freshen our midget engine after 8 races or so is because we would much rather spend $3500-$5000 as opposed to spending $10-$12k because we let it go one race to long and broke a rod or dropped a valve. I will say this, we have owned some engines that ran like old watches and never missed a beat. Sometimes when that's the case, the engine dictates what it wants in terms of maintainance and rebuilds.

The bottom line in what we have learned is to find an engine you can afford (whether it's a $4000 or a $40,000) and treat it like a baby. We take our engine in for "checkups" after all mile races and if anything out of the ordinary happens. It's always cheaper to give a builder you trust $250 to check it out and know it's probably ok that it is to just assume it is.

A final story for you.... We were testing at IRP and a kid from out west was in town and asked if he could share track time which is very common so we let him. He had an esslinger that was 5 races from being a fresh motor and about 1/2 way throguh the test he pulled in with the motor off. He got out, walked down to our pits, and asked my dad to look at an oil filter. Basically the car lost oil pressure for just a second before he shut it down and was under the assution that the oil filer had failed (collapsed). My dads advice was simple, load it up and take the oil pan off at the shop to make sure that you didn't damage a bearing. long story short, he slapped a new filter on it and went back out. It lasted 6 laps before breaking the block and nearly every internal piece possible to the tune of a $16,000 fix. moral of the story... it's always cheaper to do it right that to try to get by when it comes to engines.


kevin studley