Builders are always in need of quality engine parts, and when your company spends hundreds of hours upgrading custom vehicles from mild to wild, you tend to get a pretty good handle on the requirements to do so. The Livernois Motorsports team has a monster facility in Dearborn Heights, Michigan — just outside the heart of Motown — and has a number of products on display this year that they’ve developed to correct deficiencies in particular platforms.

“We’ve got 2.3-liter upgraded rods and pistons for the EcoBoost, there’s a delete kit to remove the balance shaft, and upgraded fasteners for the oil pump,” says Andy Ricketts, Livernois’ shop supervisor.

“We’ve seen those deflect under high-load situations,” he said. “We’re also working on cylinder heads to improve the flow on the intake side. We also have a sleeved option for the block if someone is trying to build a lot of horsepower.”

The company’s EcoBoost pistons have been developed in-house, with special attention paid to the skirt profile, crown design, and ring locations. The company went through and looked at the deficits of the original-equipment pistons and built their product to correct these issues.

A complete turbocharger upgrade kit has also been designed and tested on Livernois in-house EcoBoost Mustang testbed vehicle.

“The way we went about it is different from others we’ve seen. Instead of using a welded adapter, we’ve created a solution that didn’t have any welds in it to break –something that would handle anything you could throw at it. We have a billet CNC-machined adapter — it goes from the factory cylinder head flange that allows us to use a V-band flange on a Precision turbo. It’s a nice compact package that has lots of flexibility for sizing,” says Ricketts.

Also hanging out on the table is a wide variety of engine parts, including Livernois-engineered oil pump gears for the 5.0-liter, 6.2-liter, and 2/3/4V modular engines, along with billet timing chain guides for the 5.0 and 2/3/4V platforms.

“The 2011-14, and 2015-16 5.0-liter has VCT for a reason. When you go really big on the camshaft, or with aftermarket engine controllers that don’t use the VCT functionality, you want to still have as much power and performance that you can. This system allows you to independently time the phaser system in a fixed configuration plus or minus 12 degrees from zero point,” says Ricketts. “Ours has an interlocking tooth design on it that locks it in place and spreads the load out to a specific point and spread out the energy — and it’s done in a one-degree increment. One tooth is one degree.”