There’s no rational decision flowchart that lands you here. No one, least of all Daniel Warner, thinks putting a 27-liter tank engine in a Ford Crown Victoria makes a lick of sense. Petty details like logic and reason won’t stop him, though.
“It’s not an intelligent choice of engine if you want to have 2500 hp and race. This is more just, I wanted to do this out of pure passion,” Werner told Road & Track in June 2020. Back then it was just a goal. The car was far from operational. A year later, it’s still got some distance to close, but a new YouTube video shows that the engine is now running. The so-called Meteor Interceptor lives.
There’s still some distance to close, of course. The Meteor Interceptor has no interior, an incomplete body, and no transmission. The turbochargers are not hooked up to the mighty tank engine, meaning it’s nowhere near its target power output of 2500hp. Given the idle issues, too, the team likely hasn’t sorted the engine programming.
But the progress is astounding. The engine design—penned in 1941—featured magneto ignition. Now it’ll have a custom computer-controlled set of injectors capable of supplying it with 24 liters of fuel per minute. Fuel will be exhausted in four minutes at full throttle. Not to worry, though: It will boil its coolant long before that happens.
If he can solve that, big plans lie in wait. Werner told Road & Track that he intends to bring the Meteor Interceptor to the Nürburgring for a lap at the hands of ‘Ring master Misha Charoudin. Asked about the coolant issue, Werner told us the following in an email:
“Well it is only at full throttle that we expect this problem, at normal operations it will work fine. And I don’t think that we will be able to have full throttle for so long on the ring anyway :-D”
The plan is ridiculous. But nobody pretended it would make any sense in the first place.
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