Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Knocking on 11's

Went to Steele again this past Sunday, May 15th, for a beautiful day of racing.

The only change in the cars was the addition of JBA Shorty Headers. The install was very easy and getting it tightened up for no leaks took a while, but it fits nicely.

I used the same tune from the last time, and immediately I was in the 12:20's at almost 113 mph. With some more tweaking of the timing advance to get rid of Knock Reduction up top and be a little more aggressive down low, I was able to set a new personal best:

Sixty: 1.653
330: 5.021
1/8: 7.799 @ 88.66
1/4: 12.191 @ 112.89

The sixty-foot is amazing for a bolt-on car, and the time is great. It means I'm just two-tenths from an eleven-second run, which is very doable with my next mod, 3.45 gears in the rear. I'm just swapping out the differential from a manual Camaro that has 3.45 gears for my automatic differential that has 3.27 gears.

Here's a simple in-car video.



Interestingly, I used an App called "Dynolicious" for my IPhone on that run, and it was very accurate on the timing.




The horsepower is just a calculation using weight (4000 lbs) and drivetrain loss (15%). But more interesting is the horsepower that each change has gained. I put together a simple spreadsheet:




So that's a gain of almost 90 base horsepower since my first run, and the individual runs are very interesting.



Shows you what a few simple bolt-ons can do!

Oh, and I decided to name the car "The Heretic", because the Conventional Wisdom in the hot-rodding world is that Shorty Headers and Midpipes don't gain you much power. Everyone says you must get Long Tube Headers for good power. Well, the numbers are there, I gained 43.14 base horsepower. Since I'm going against that "Gospel", guess that makes me a Heretic. :-)