By the end of the 1950s, car designers had gone to great lengths with their obsession over tailfins and chrome. Yet the cars they designed are among some of the most beautiful ever conceived, including the 1959 Cadillac, which is always remembered for its huge tailfins and distinctive roofline. As gorgeous as a car it was though, it was offered with just one engine; a 390 cubic-inch V8 making 345 horsepower. This made the Cadillac powerful, but hardly fast.
Enter Nelson Racing Engines, which put together an absolute monster of a motor they nicknamed the “Mo-Cad.” This 1,500 horsepower HEMI was dropped under the hood of this gorgeously done ‘59 Cadillac, creating a combination beauty and beast that only NRE could create.
Packing 472 cubic-inches, two turbochargers, a custom intake, and a stunning chrome finish, the Mo-Cad engine is itself a work of art, and a functional one at that. Nelson Racing Engines has made a name for themselves by building streetable motors making 1,000+ horsepower. And they did it again with the Mo-Cad engine, which as you can hear in the video, sounds like a soul-sucking demon out to destroy us all.
The thing that makes Nelson engines special is that they’re both beautiful and deliver varying levels of performance. The idea is to build an engine you can live with every day, but can open up the gates of Hell with a flip of the switch. Nelson has done just that, and even Tom Nelson himself says this is possibly the most beautiful HEMI he has ever built. That’s saying a lot.