Video: this mad two-stroke V8 drag car wants to destroy eardrums

One thing is for sure. As long as humans, welding guns and an abundance of metal coexist on Earth, mad things will continue be built in sheds.

Add a sprinkling of Scandinavian enthusiasm into the mix and things get exponentially more bonkers.

Case in point: the video above.

It’s a bespoke, tubular-framed Volvo Amazon drag car with a rather distinctive engine.

Powering the Volvo is a two-stroke Evinrude 300XP V8 that spent its previous life as an outboard speedboat motor.

In the late Eighties the V8 rang out at an ear-searing 10,000rpm and shot boats across glassy water at over 190mph. It even set the record for the fastest ever two-way boat run at a blistering 176mph average. You can watch that amazing feat – and the crashing that went along with it – here. 

Thanks to some barmy lads in Sweden, the record-breaking engine has now been lugged off the back of a boat and placed into the heart of a car.

In the ultimate salute to proper old school hot rodding, these hardcore garage tinkers are making a drag car like nothing we’ve seen before. 

It’s all bespoke and has some amazing features, primarily that fabricated exhaust system. It may look like it took inspiration from a hippo’s ribcage, but its unique shape gives the engine yet more power. 

If you look closely, you can see that the exhaust swells to make an expansion chamber once it’s come out of the block, then quickly contracts again. This forces escaping air-fuel mixture back into the cylinder, apparently creating more oomph by increasing volumetric efficiency. It’s like proto-turbocharging and effectively gives you two bites of the cherry at making power. 

If that all sounds like gobbledygook, click these blue words for a visual demonstration of how it works.

But forget the science lesson: the bottom line of all this madness is that the car sounds absolutely bonkers: like the recording of a chainsaw caught in a passionate act with a popcorn machine, all piped through a Marshall stack.

At this point we’d normally tell you to crank your speakers to ‘Vol MAX’. But to remove any risk of perforated eardrums, we’d exercise caution and hover your finger over the volume knob and ease yourself into it.

Can you think of a stranger, better-sounding engine? Let us know below.