Nephew bought a 2009 Shelby

[Z28SSMAN]

Well, didn't make it down there before track closed. I had to freshen up some drivetrain parts (clutch/tranny) and didn't get the clutch bedded in. He found out I was serious about coming down and modded his car. His pops is shooting his mouth off about how it burns the tires thru 3 gears and the beginning of 4th. That's the very type of guy I like racing. He can buy parts but he can't buy experience. Typical cobra owner...

[DNeinstadt]

Just to clarify, a GT500 is not a Cobra... So don't lump in the Cobra drivers with the GT500's. There are (more than) two different types of Ford A-holes! ;)

And I agree, burning up the tires doesn't mean it's fast! He can sit there burning the tires while you speed right past him if he's a bad driver.

Dan

[Z28SSMAN]

Sorry Mr. Dan. My apologies. How clumsy of me.

I used to take offense (not) when people said my SS-454 was a nice running Malibu.

When I raced a guy at Northstar, a friend said he saw me pull away from the other car and shouted out to the crowd "that 'Bu' is gone"! (Bu short for Malibu). I really got offended.

I once told a guy I liked his Javelin. He glared back and said "it's not a Javelin--it's an AMX!!!"

Either way...when the weather clears up, I'm heading down there to bitchslap him and his bogus wannabe car.

[Fast One]

Sorry Mr. Dan. My apologies. How clumsy of me.

I used to take offense (not) when people said my SS-454 was a nice running Malibu.

When I raced a guy at Northstar, a friend said he saw me pull away from the other car and shouted out to the crowd "that 'Bu' is gone"! (Bu short for Malibu). I really got offended.

I once told a guy I liked his Javelin. He glared back and said "it's not a Javelin--it's an AMX!!!"

Either way...when the weather clears up, I'm heading down there to bitchslap him and his bogus wannabe car.

LOL! Over the years, I've had a few people tell me than I have a really nice Monte Carlo SS. I just smile, and say thanks - but it's a Buick Grand National. If they ask what the difference is, I just tell 'em that if you removed 100 HP & 150 pounds of torque, added 3-4 seconds to the 0-60 time, knocked ~40 MPH or so off the top-end, and knocked about 75% off what it's worth - then it would be a Monte Carlo SS.

Joel

[MR.hp]

And to think I wanted one of those slow SS cars years ago. LOL

[Fast One]

Yeah, the mid-70s to late-80s were some of the darkest years ever for GM performance. The only true bright-spots were the turbo Regals & the '89 TTA. Buick was the only GM marque in those days that had the balls to break the stale old mold & actually put modern tech on the street at a semi-affordable price - with the first truly practical turbocharged production car, one of the first production-car tuned-port SFI systems, the first distributorless ignition system in the entire world, the first production engine to use knock-retard, and an ECU orchestrating it all that had 5 times the computing power of the Space Shuttle.

The other GM marques had pretty much flushed their horsepower & torque numbers down the drain in search of a cheap & easy way to meet federal emissions standards. (Remember the horrible electrified quadrajunk carb?? Somebody should have been shot just for suggesting that.) Just think of how much further along we'd be today if the others would have bit the bullet & invested in tuned-port SFI, DIS, and advanced engine-management right off - rather than essentially being dragged there a decade later....kicking & screaming all the way.

Joel

[Z28SSMAN]

You make excellent points Joel. New cars from early 70s thru late 80s-except a handful were pathetic. Some didn't even have 200hp. The only ones with a pulse were maybe a Trans AM SD or maybe a 5.0 Mustank. The GN and TTA were in a class of their own. In the 90s, the Syclone & Typhoon and the SS Camaro LT1 brought respect back and of course with the introduction of the LS1 in '97 produced many Bitchslappings to Ford. It forced Ford to bring out an over rated Mustang which still got bitchslapped by many an f-body. The Ford owners complained about the misleading HP ratings which caused Ford to recall them with "the fix". Then Ford gets tired of getting their asses handed to them and bring out the '03 Cobra and say it's the terminator. Road tests and comparisons performed against Camaros from a previous year. They hated the LS1s so bad, they had to pay GM back for all the bitchslapping the LS1 crowd handed out, but it came a year too late. From the history I've seen, the main thing it terminated was a bunch of cobra motors. Pop pop pop just like popcorn blowing up left and right. Ford felt so bad for their loyal followers, they brought the replacement engine price down from over $10k to about $4k.

[Fast One]

Interesting history on the ponycar war.

So, I take it that the 4th-gen Mustang GT 4.6L I spanked in a stoplight race with my wrong-wheel-drive GTP must have been one of the overrated models? :laughing smile:

Joel

[Z28SSMAN]

Interesting history on the ponycar war.

So, I take it that the 4th-gen Mustang GT 4.6L I spanked in a stoplight race with my wrong-wheel-drive GTP must have been one of the overrated models? :laughing smile:

Joel

That's funny, Joel. I'm sure he appreciated getting walked by your GTP.

Isn't it ironic that in the years where the Ford loyalists were getting bitchslapped by the Camaros, they constantly said horsepower wasn't what people were most concerned about. They pointed out how the Mustang outselling the Camaro was proof enough. Now that GM proves the Camaro does more than straight line accelerate and has suspension technology Ford can't match, Ford guys hone in strictly on straight line performance.

Here's a link about the over-rated hp which required a recall>http://auto.howstuffworks.com/1999-2...d-mustang4.htm

Here's another one: http://www.muscularmustangs.com/2005/svtcobraslow99.php

Pre "fix" manifold: http://www.lx.net/jlynch/pre-fix.html

Post "fix" manifold: http://www.lx.net/jlynch/fix-intake.html

[Z28SSMAN]

News flash....I've just been informed that my nephew's bogus modded GT500 had the tips burned off all his plugs.

[MR.hp]

News flash....I've just been informed that my nephew's bogus modded GT500 had the tips burned off all his plugs.

Lean Lean Lean, I wonder what the pistons look like? Oh wait, I think I hear the explosion train a coming.:banana smile:

[Fast One]

That sucks. I'm curious, though - WTF is the point of running a modern performance engine lean enough to destroy the plugs? Most (if not all) modern engines will pull craploads of timing in an attempt to prevent detonation if you do that. If it's running lean enough to melt the plugs, I'd think that the engine would be in 'permanent ping/detonation mode' whenever the throttle is mashed. The computer would pull all the timing it could & pretty much keep it there, which would more than offset any possible HP gain from leaning it out to the ragged edge. Am I missing something, here???

Regarding my race with the 4.6L GT - the driver was probably in his teens or early 20s, and it was his idea to race. He was actually a good sport about getting beat. I don't think he knew what he was getting himself into, though. The blown 40th Anny doesn't have any GTP emblems. The only giveaways that it's blown are the dual heat extractors on the hood with small chrome 'Supercharged' emblems on the outward sides. Those who aren't 'in the know' about the blown 40th Anny version would think it's just a regular GP. They'd have to be pretty observant to actually read the emblems.

We left at the light. He briefly pulled ahead, but soon saw taillights once the GTP hooked-up. Got up to about 60 MPH before I had to slow down for the next light. Looked in the mirror & I had him by more car-lengths than I can estimate. He pulled up at the next light, rolled his window down, gave me a thumbs-up, and asked me what mods I had done. When I told him that it was stock aside from a tune & getting rid of the resonator & U-bend, he gave me an incredulous look. That's when I realized he had no clue. I gestured towards the heat extractors & told him that it was the blown version - which appeared to make him feel a bit better. He then told me that his Mustang had tall gears & did better at higher speeds, and asked if I wanted to go for a highway run. I said "Sure. By the way - I also disabled the speed limiter." He backed down for some reason.....

Back when the blown W-bodies were new, a friend of mine who was the service manager at the local GM dealer up north was telling me about how quick the banker's wife's new Regal GS was. When I mentioned that I thought putting a speed limiter on a Buick GS was sacrilege, he told me that the guys at the GM proving grounds ran one around the track with the limiter disabled & it just kept on slowly accelerating until it hit ~150 MPH & the car didn't have the aerodynamics for those speeds - hence the governor. So, I suppose my GTP might be capable of 150-ish - given a long enough straightaway. I would have certainly expected the mighty Mustang GT 4.6 to be capable of outrunning an ungoverned W-body. Oh - I forgot - the "mighty 4.6" was rated at a decidedly unimpressive 215-225 HP until 2001. Only 10-20 HP more than the n/a version of the 3800 Series II pushrod V6. :lol:WTF did Ford do wrong to get just 10-20 more HP out of a DOHC V8 with 50 more cubes??

Joel

[Z28SSMAN]

Joel…people have criticized Chev's "old pushrod technology" for years. GM fell for the hype and introduced the ZR1 back in '90 with its double o'head cam powertrain. A complicated design that looked good on paper..but with the introduction of the LS1 in '97..it was proven that an engine doesn't need 32 valves and 4 cam's to produce impressive power. In fact...in 2002, the Z06 produced 405 hp with the less complicated LS6. That bested the 32 valve ZR1's 375 hp.

[98 cobra s/c]

Some 4.6's are fast, not all.

[Fast One]

Sometimes the engineers get things exactly right, and sometimes they get things exactly wrong - as has been the case for most engine designs over the years, regardless of manufacturer. Sometimes, they even screw up with the same block. Case in point - the masterpiece of automotive engineering known as the Chevy 302 vs. the crappy 307 & 267 SBC variants.

Nonetheless - it seems pretty odd that in 2001, Ford still wasn't getting any more power out of their highly-touted 4.6L OHC V8 than Buick was getting out of their naturally-aspirated 3.8L pushrod V6 grocery-getter engine. Granted - the 3800 has gone down in history as the best V6 engine ever produced in the world. But still, one would expect a high-tech OHC V8 to trounce a similar-year n/a pushrod V6 with 20% less displacement in a dyno pull.

At any rate - I'm not anti-tech at all - provided that it is done right. GM's all-forged 3.6L quad-cam 24-valve V6 kicks ass. The V6 Camaro's n/a 3.6L produces a whopping 1.49 NET HP per cube! That's 320 HP from a 217 cid n/a engine that only weighs 350 pounds! The engine has many racing goodies - such as a hardened, forged steel crank, billet aluminum domed pistons with oil jet cooling, high copper-content powdered-metal sinter-forged rods, 6-bolt mains, a structural cast aluminum oil pan with baffles, and a structural front cover. The twin-turbo version in the 2014 CTS puts out 420 HP at a low 5750 RPM. Peak torque is 430 lb from 3500-4500 RPM, and 90% of it is available from 2500-5500 RPM - and it has essentially zero turbo lag.

All of that from a 217 cube, 350 pound V6 that's built like a brick outhouse. High-tech is great when it's done right.

Joel