Behind the Scenes at BluePrint Engines

Here at Speedway Motors, we offer a huge variety of crate engines from BluePrint Engines. They’ve proven to be reliable, powerful engines for us and for our customers. We also love that they’re right up the road from our Lincoln, NE headquarters. Located in Kearney, NE, Blue Print has over 200,000 square feet of state of the art manufacturing and assembly space. Recently, we took a trip to check out the plant and talk to CEO and founder Norris Marshall.

We were impressed to learn that BluePrint designs and produces all of their own engines. That means that blocks, heads, cranks, and other raw materials are designed in-house, cast in an OE foundry in Germany, then machined and assembled under one roof right here in Nebraska. This allows them to not only keep their engines affordable, but also create some unique, cool, and powerful engines. (Check out that hot rodded four-cylinder in the R&D lab in the above video!)

Another remarkable thing about BluePrint crate engines is that every single engine is run on the dyno before it leaves the facility. This not only verifies that the engine makes the advertised power numbers, but it also confirms that each engine will run right out of the crate with no problems. In the words of Norris Marshall, “I know who’s finding those problems; it’s the guy who runs the engine the first time. And here, we make sure that that’s us.”

We’ve also used BluePrint crate engines in several of our own Speedway Motors projects . The 383 in our Project Chevelle was flawless, and actually made more than the advertised horsepower when we had it on the dyno. It went on to live in our ’32 with a blower bolted to the top. We also mercilessly flogged a big-inch BluePrint small block in our Nova autocrosser and it kept coming back for more.

Check out all the BluePrint engines available from Speedway Motors. There’s one for every budget and every power level, from mild-mannered driver to brutal, supercharged monster!