From the outside, Eddie Rodriguez’s 2006 Porsche 911 looks like a fairly typical hot-rodded 997-generation Carerra S. The car’s got some GT3 Cup-style fender flares and a Euro-spec factory body kit, but there’s nothing to hint that there’s anything outlandish is going on underneath the skin. Turn the key, though, and that story changes dramatically.

“When I got the car back in 2019, it was more or less stock,” he explains. “And I drove it like that for a few years. Then an oil pump failure detonated the engine at around 83,000 miles.”

Rodriguez started looking into getting another engine, but when he discovered that a replacement 3.8-liter flat-six would cost him upwards of $35,000, he decided to look into what alternatives were available. “The plan was to punch it out to a 4.0 if the original engine was rebuildable, but it was truly toast, and that added sourcing a core to the price tag. The cost just didn’t make sense.”

For a few months he debated what direction to go with the project. “One day I found about this company out here in Las Vegas called Renegade Hybrids that specializes in Porsche engine swaps,” he recalls. “They gave me a tour of the shop and kind of a rundown of what we’d need to do to make it work, and it looked surprisingly easy to put an LS in this car. So we put a built LS2 in it a few weeks ago. Everything worked like it came from the factory – AC and all.”

Aside from the LS2 – which he estimates to be good for about 450 horsepower – all of the other powertrain hardware onboard is Porsche factory-spec stuff, including the six-speed manual gearbox.

But the story doesn’t end there. “I spent a month just having a blast with it,” he says. “And then it spun a rod.”

With just over a week to go before LS Fest West came into town, it was a mad rush to get the engine sorted out in time. “We finished the car yesterday at about four in the morning! It was crazy – we couldn’t find a crank for it because everything’s on backorder. A friend of mine owns a speed shop here in town and he had one, but it needed to be cut. It was a lot of long nights after work to get everything back together in time.”

All of the work has been well worth the effort, he says. “I owned a Corvette Z06 prior to this, but this is something really different. It’s very torquey now; it’s a totally different feeling, and the handling is there. It’s such a unique experience.”

As for what’s next? More power, of course. “We built the LS2 to handle boost, so hopefully I’ll be back next year with a twin turbo setup,” he tells us. “That’s the plan.”