Bill Dailey and his team at Dailey Engineering in California produce some of the most impressive oil pans in the racing industry, made entirely of 6061 aluminum with a machined finish that are fit for placing on display in a case as much as they are underneath an engine. But the Dailey team has taken their popular oil pan design one step further, delivering what is essentially a modular, three-piece pan design for road course racers.

In a typical two-piece Dailey pan, there’s a pan and a cover, and the pump is mounted where it is and is catered to a specific pump configuration out of the box. There’s no changing it once its manufactured. The new three-piece pan, however, features the pan, and a secondary pump mount plate, which according to Dailey, allows one to move the pump from one side to the other, or switch pumps entirely, whether it has four sections, three sections, two, and so on. The pump also also be positioned forward or back depending on ones needs.

“It gives you the flexibility to move the pump around. The pan itself never changes. It’s a standard issue part, and it’s just the covers that change,” says Dailey.

While the new design may seem to render a two-piece pan obsolete on the surface, Dailey sees it as anything but, as the design doesn’t cater to every market, and at the same time, presents tradeoffs with a two-piece pump.

“A two-piece pan is shallower and lighter, which is what the drag racers want. The Three-piece is a deeper section, because we have to add things to it, and therefore it’s heavier. So there are pros and cons.”

As Dailey tells us, the design largely came about from his involvement with offroad racing trucks, were the engines are mounted on different sides, necessitating the need to move the pump around. This, he says, was a quick tool to allow the engines (and pumps) to fit in chassis that they couldn’t before, without changing the entire pan out. The pan, however, is still very much targeted at a number of racing applications. Dailey Engineering already has modular three-piece pan on a big-cube pulling truck, and he shared that an NHRA Pro Stock team will be running a three-piece on next season.

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At this time, there are pans and plate configurations for small and big block Chevrolet, five-inch bores pace Chevrolet big blocks, 302 and 351 small block Ford, small block Mopar, and wide pan rail SBC.