Duy Bui is an old-school import racer that has been racing since the early 2000s with a variety of Toyota 2JZ-powered machines, but his 1997 Toyota Supra known as “The Money Pit” is going a different route in the engine department. Gone is the inline six-cylinder engine and in its place is over 500 cubic-inches of raw V8 horsepower. Bui’s Supra is going to turn heads in the No Prep and Grudge world with some big performances while making purists scream about what he has created.

The Money Pit started life as your average Supra until Bui turned it over to Stevens Race Cars and PROSPEED. The team at Stevens Race Cars crafted an immaculate chassis that will house the 527 cubic-inch Brad Anderson Engines billet Hemi that feeds on a diet of methanol for fuel. M&M Transmission provided a close-ratio TH400 to back the V8 along with the ProTorque torque converter to round out the driveline. A Strange Engineering 9-inch rearend is being paired with a set of triple adjustable Penske Racing Shocks that are Co2-assisted to put all the power down when the throttle is mashed to the floor.

Making the boost is a single 106mm turbo that breathes through a PROSPEED turbo system they fabricated in-house. Keeping the Hemi running is a Motec M150 ECU with a PROSPEED ProDrag Package, Motec PDM for power management, and a Motec C127 display to let Bui know what the car is doing on the track.

Why on earth would Bui take such an iconic car with a solid powerplant, cut it up, and jam a Hem in it with a giant turbo? The answer according to David Donnals from PROSPEED is simple: so more time can be spent racing and less time on maintenance with the engine.

“We have been running the stock block 2JZ in our White Rice 240sx for some time; we swapped it over to a billet 2JZ for this car and built a whole turbo system with a Pro Mod 106. We found that going into the 2,200-2,400 horsepower range we would need to pull the engine and refresh it too frequently with the 2JZ. So the decision was made to put the billet 2JZ in White Rice and run a billet Hemi in the Supra so we could spend more time racing. For now, we are limiting horsepower by running the single 106 so the engine will hardly be working and we can run the small-tire class in No Prep. In the future, we will do another turbo system and run two Pro Mod 94s or bigger depending on our goals and what races we will run.”

The team at PROSPEED plans to get a handle on this monster by running in the small-tire No Prep and grudge ranks for a while. After they figure out what the car wants they will expand how much and where it will be raced. One thing is for certain, you won’t find another Supra out there like the Money Pit that combines a classic American V8 engine in an iconic Japanese sports car.