The Devel Sixteen May Have Been Vaporware, But Its 5,000-HP V16 Was Legit

I haven’t thought about the Devel Sixteen in years, and chances are, you haven’t either. But if you were into supercars seven or eight years ago, you undoubtedly heard the buzz. It was supposed to be a Bugatti slayer out of Dubai with not 1,000 horsepower, not 2,000 hp, but 5,000 hp from a quad-turbo V16 engine. That seemed like the most unrealistic of all the mighty claims, but as it turns out, Steve Morris Engines in Michigan had the powerplant ready to go with dyno numbers to prove it.

Morris posted an hour-long tell-all to his YouTube channel late last week, diving deep into his experience with Devel Motors. The company, whose website you can still visit, was started by three brothers in Dubai who wanted to create something beyond what Bugatti or Koenigsegg could. You can only imagine how tough that might be, considering the former had full backing from the VW Group while the latter… well, it has Christian Von Koenigsegg, a force of nature unto himself.

“They contacted me and said, ‘Can you build a 5,000-horsepower V16?'” Morris recalls.

“Friggin’ right I can,” he responded.

He didn’t believe they were serious until they flew him and a coworker to Dubai to talk business in 2014. They reached an agreement, and Morris went home with the task of developing an incredibly high-horsepower V16. Most importantly, it had to be repeatable, which Morris says it was—he still has what he needs to build one today, but don’t expect to buy one for a measly sum like $100,000.

The video includes tons of details, and if you want the whole story, I’ll leave it to Morris to explain. What I found especially insane was what it took to make the engine work as one, because it consisted of two LS3 crate V8s with lots of custom parts. Obviously, there’s all the necessary machining and fabrication, but SME also tuned each LS3 to run on different firing orders using two ECUs. This was done to smooth out the V16’s operation so it wouldn’t rattle and shake apart at high rpm.

SME included the engine dyno run in its storytime video, and since that clip was uploaded on its own nearly 10 years ago, it’s gathered more than six million views. I understand why, given that it resulted in a massive 5,007 hp at the crank. The graph showed peak horsepower coming on right at 7,000 rpm, while peak torque was around 3,700 lb-ft. Who knows what that would feel like at full-tilt?

The only running videos I’ve found of the Sixteen are super low-speed. Maybe one of you can fork over enough money to buy one from SME and try it for yourself. Like he says, though, you probably can’t afford one if you have to ask how much it costs.

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