I'm not sure Smokeme. Seems a bit strange that the article only gives a few picture angles of the engine compartment, and it seems very unclear as to what exactly the engine is.
Also, I've never seen a 16V FIRE engine in the flesh so I don't know what it looks like, but it does seem surprising that they switched the sides of the exhaust and inlet of the cylinder head
The normal 8V FIRE engines have the exhaust at the front and the inlet at the back. But in those pictures it appears to have the exhaust at the back and the inlet at the front??????
I do agree with you though, that rather than going to all that trouble to fit the 16V FIRE head to the turbo's ohc engine block, it would make more sense to fit a whole 16V super FIRE engine after modifying its internals to turbo spec. Plus the 16V engine would drop straight into place based as it is on the 8V FIRE engine.
In fact, I'm begining to think that is what they did, and it might explain all the custom ECU's (rather than use the standard turbo ECU meant for a different engine) and the fact that they were so cagey in explaining how they got the 16V head fitted.
Anyone have a picture of a 16V super FIRE engine we can see?