Sitting here mindlessly eating a sandwich for lunch at a time that is closer to dinner and got to thinking about John's fears of how tough it is to get a Pontiac to work in FAST.
To offset some of the fears and show that we are making some good progress and even though our testing has been a bit disjointed as some of it was never meant to be done for FAST racing I will be a bit more open. Plus I really enjoy John, Paul and there dad. They have always been fabulously kind to me and I want them to maybe take this as a small push towards rejoining the fray. Plus two Pontiac teams working together on ideas and sharing progress could greatly shorten the learning curves for all. Maybe everyone on this forum can help me give a gentle push for them to turn their '69 Goat into a FAST RA IV for next season. John I will offer up front that what I learn I will share with you. Mostly in private of course. But I will offer some publicly here.
Here is where we stand:
1) We tested your motor on the dyno. And flowed the heads... Using your work and the motors ET/MPH as a guide here is how it has gone. We tested our current set up in a good but less than optimal car. The setup is making about 50 hp and 30 tq up on your setup. At this time of testing we were only playing around as we were far from the decision or thought to go racing in FAST. It was just a motor built that fit inside the FAST specs but really was more intended as garage furniture or maybe street use. And not remotely set up for max performance. It ran an MPH of what you would expect from the extra hp in car with similar weight to your T37. So it was your 116 + our hp difference (sorry folks not ready to put numbers out their but I will give enough info for you to make a solid guess) Our motors rpm window was similar to yours but just a bit higher. Our bird weights about 250 lbs. lighter than your T37. You can add that into the mph as well I hope at the race. What we are testing next is modeling out to about 50 more hp but keeping similar tq on our current motor specs. If this comes true or even if only a part of it is realized I hope it will put us forward. If not we run it as it currently is. These changes though we are hoping open up the rpm window by a solid 500 rpm with some extra hp. If we get the hp and rpm we can hopefully stack on a bit more mph to the equation above.
2) We have tested the trans set up we are going with in a car that runs what would equate to a PS setup. At that time we also tested our custom built tq converter. The test vehicle makes solid power. It would consistently turn lower 12.10's @ 115 mph on 1.82 short times with upper 12.08's as its fastest ever. We ran it on a day that had the worst air the car had ever run in. The air was 2500 feet and the car had run in air as low as 100 feet before but nothing ever over 2000. We did not re-jet or tune the car for the air. We simply tested the trans and converter. Our converter is very low on slip %. Anyhow the car ran the exact same short times as ever staying in the 1.82 range. The killer deal was the worst run of our test beat every previous run when comparing old time slips. Not only was its slowest time slip of the day better at 330', 594', 660', 1000' and 1/4 than the best it had ever previously run but the mph was up at every marker recorded. The converter was working because it was running the extra mph but was crossing the traps down 200 rpm from usual without all the slip of a normal high performance converter. The better thing is that it was now consistently running 11.8'
[email protected]. The test cars traction down track on gear changes seemed to be stronger also. The car was running steadily .3 faster and + 1.5 mph. We even left the spare and jack in which usually come out. So worse air and weight and the worst run of the day dominated the best ever. We are checking over the trans to make sure that test day did no harm. That will be our race setup for now.
3) We have used our to be race vehicle set up as a PS car. The suspension work/testing we have done, on a decidedly much less powerful motor, was consistantly pulling most to all of the left front tire off the ground on luanch all three days we had it out testing. It hooked perfect down track also. Now lets not get too excited as the car makes a ton less power than what it will have to handle with a FAST motor. I am sure the apple cart will be good and upset by the major change in performance. It does offer an optimistic starting point for now though.
If we can get our motor to rpm like we hope with the newest setup it should allow us to use a 4.10 gear in Virginia. That should help us out over the 3.73 you needed to run.
Certianly we have a long ways to go. The Chevy and Hemi Mopar crowd are turning 7500+ rpm and our hope is the new setup cuts our deficit down from the current 6000 max trap rpm to a usful 6500 trap rpm. That still leaves us 1000 rpm of flexibilty short for now. The next step will be to try and work that down to 500 rpm short fall going up to 7000 rpm in the future and adding another 80+ hp. Likely though that will be the end of the trail for Poncho's in fast with the parts we have to work with. But a 7000 rpm motor with serious juice would be awfully fun.
John I hope this inspires you to rethink racing FAST. I think working together would truly shorten developement time for both groups and maybe save a couple bucks over what you probably have rightly deemed "cost prohibitive". Our current setup is a bit expensive but managable. The next motor may send that into an ugly realm to say the least. But if we can get pretty competitive with the current setup ultimately with the 440+6 and Ford cars maybe that will be good enough for a long while.
Give those Pontiac's the raspberries everyone.
Mark