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Has anyone else been following the "Fast Victor Six" project? I just finished reading the last article and I am not impressed at all. Full Comp valevetrain, custom grind comp cam, custom built Dawson headers, Lid/intake sys, Flowmaster exhaust, honed intake (???), 75 dry shot nitrous and a 14.28 best quarter mile pass. :(
Anyone esle who has read it, post up and tell me what you think.
I got in touch with the author a while ago, and hes a member here now. We emailed back and forth for a while talking ideas. His final times were a little disappointing, but there were complications.
The car made 291.3 rwhp at 5656 rpm which is a respectable number, but 14.28 in the quarter?
They also had SLP 1.8 ratio rockers for a total lift of .549 on stock valve springs and got crazy valve float, well duh! They had thier headers custom made when there are 3 companies that manufacture them? With hours upon hours of tuning they couldnt get rid of 4* of KR? No rearend upgrade with all this new power?
Its like didnt even do a lick of research before starting the project. All I can say is that, if I knew nothing about modding v6's and read this article, I would think there is no hope for my car cuz everything is CUSTOM made on theirs and is still slow.
i got a couple of the mags with them in it...ya those numbers dont make sence with the 1/4 time they had...o well atleast we know we can make a better time
87 Firebird RIP
96 Camaro RS RIP
94 Patriot Red 1LE Z28 - Sold
02 WS6 TA - Sold
It put down 290 to the wheels? Some stock LS1s do that, its easily a mid 13 car. With the right suspension, gears, and driving that could be an incredible car
Black \'94 Trans Am A4- SLP CAI & Loudmouth<br />Red \'93 Firebird A4- Ram Air under the WS6 hood, !cat, exhaust.
"...his time sucks..."
"Maybe he doesn't know how to drive? "
"...if I knew nothing about modding v6's and read this article, I would think there is no hope for my car cuz everything is CUSTOM made on theirs and is still slow."
"ya those numbers dont make sense with the 1/4 time they had...o well at least we know we can make a better time"
"driver mod needs to be done because the driver cannot handle a manual"
Holy crap, dudes....you are one gnarly crowd, that's for sure.
What I find annoying about forums is people who trash talk but use screen names. They're too chicken s**t to put their names on what they say.
Well, my name is Hib Halverson and I was the guy who built the Fast Victor Six project car in "Camaro Performers" magazine, then wrote and imaged the magazine series.
First, let me say that I'm grateful to, "Camaro Performers" Editor, Tony Kelly, for having us in his magazine for a year. Secondly, I am not employed by Primedia, the company that publishes "Camaro Performers" magazine. I did the article series on a contract basis as an independent technical writer. Thirdly, when I post here; I do not speak on behalf of the magazine nor am I a spokesperson for Primedia.
When we road tested the car, our acceleration times sucked. No one was more disappointed in that than me. But, rather than fake good results, I wrote the series exactly as it took place.
How'd we end up at only 14.2 with 220 or so SAE at the wheels?
There are some realities of the magazine business that didn't end-up in print. The one that affected this situation is "Camaro Performers" is on a tight budget. The car was built and tested in the Los Angels area where there are no 1/4 mile drag strips operating regularly. There is Pomona Raceway, of course, but that mainly runs for the NHRA Winternationals and Finals. It does have "street legal" events occasionally, but they were never at times convenient to our editorial and shop schedules. One can rent Pomona, as well, but doing so is hundreds of dollars per day and requires the user to have $5,000,000 worth of liability insurance--hardly budget items the magazine will cover. The next nearest, regularly running strip is at high altitude and farther away. Sadly, the magazine was unable to spend the money to either rent Pomona or cover the cost of traveling to LACR, the track up in the high desert. Plus I hate racing at LACR, anyway, because of the altitude. Even the chassis dyno time was not paid-for by the magazine. That came out of my checks for writing the articles. I'm grateful to our dyno vendor, Westech, for giving me a discount for running there so often. If you're in the L.A. area and need truly professional chassis dyno services, go there.
We ran all our 1/4-miles tests on highways late at night. Further, the last sessions were run at sea level in cold weather so the density altitude was in negative numbers, ie: the motor made a ton of torque. Our launch pad was, basically, the shoulder of US 101. We were on street tires and not drag radials. On nitrous, we were spinning the tires through most of first gear. We used a Vericom VC3000 for timing and that system does not have roll-out (there's anywhere from 1-3 tenths right there). Lastly, we wounded the transmission almost at the start of the test and from then on, the 1-2 shift, the most critical one in a 1/4-mi pass, was always tough.
No doubt, these are freakin' sob-story, excuses but, nevertheless, they happened and they contributed to the car going 14.2 rather than a low 13.
So...where's the project going next?
Well, it's done for now and maybe for good in the magazine. There is a chance "Camaro Performers" might want us back later this year, but no deal's been made, yet. The series is going to be rewritten and the car further developed. New articles will be posted in serial form this year and perhaps into early '08 on The Camaro Homepage (www.camarohomepage.com) starting in about a month.
We've already made some changes since the final magazine article appeared. We removed the SLP 1.8 rockers and installed the new, "second design" 1.7s from Yella Terra then took the car back to the chassis dyno at Westech. The car made 224 hp SAE at the wheels at 5750 rpm, a slight improvement over our last no-nitrous test and that's with 1.7 rather than 1.8 rockers. Torque, SAE at the wheels, was 222 lbs/ft. at 4650 rpm and was over 200 lbs/ft from 2500 rpm to 5800 rpm so, the torque curve seems reasonably wide.
We did not use our Nitrous Supply nitrous oxide system in this most recent test session because we were there mainly to validate the Yella Terra rockers as working with our Comp Cam without putting the engine into valve float. I believe we fixed that problem, as the engine pulled hard to its 6200 rpm rev limiter. In our previous tests, w/o spray, back in Oct. '06, we made about 220 at the wheels but couldn't get past 5650 rpm without valve float.
Though valve float is gone, at least with 1.7s, our old nemesis, knock retard, is back. Even on a mix of pump and 100-oct race gas, I was seeing 1-2 deg. KR during these passes. KR is back, because, for some unknown reason (that was the other issue we were testing to investigate) the motor has gone lean by a full air-fuel ratio. Last test, back in Oct. , we were right at 12.5-12.7 air-fuel. Now were up at 13.7 or so and, obviously, when the engine is that lean at WOT, it's gonna detonate, even with 94 oct. or so.
But here's the worst part. The other day, right at the end of the final test pass, we set the motor on fire. Ooops. I had a fuel pressure test gauge connected to the engine during all three of these passes to see if we had a low fuel pressure problem at WOT. At the end of the third run, with the motor at 6000 rpm or so, V6 vibration and the gauge hose moving around, loosened the fitting on the fuel rail. As soon as I saw the leak, I gave the cut sign to the dyno operator but with the fuel pressure these cars run, even for a fraction of a second before he clicked the ign. off, there was a half a quart or so of gas leaking down the back of the motor. Obviously, the exhaust was hot enough to be an ignition source so--Poof!--we had a hot fire going.
Westech had a halon bottle next to the dyno, so I had the fire out in seconds. Gotta love halon compared to dry chemical for fighting gasoline fires, that's for sure. I spent a number of years working for the SCCA as a firefighter. i put out a bunch of race car fires with either 20-lb hand-operated or 150-lb truck-mounted, dry chemical fire extinguishers, but never used halon on a car fire until the other day. It's pretty expensive, compared to dry-chem, but man, does it work great. I'm kinda thinkin', in my own shop, I'm going to swap-out the dry chem bottles I have hanging on the wall for halon. But....I digress.
Ok, so where am I going next with this car?
Well, we've got repairs to do, mainly the MAP sensor, 3 or 4 wiring connectors on the right side of the motor, replace some plastic vacuum pipes and put some new plastic split-loom in place where the existing stuff melted. I've got the upper intake off and there is no more damage than that. Next, I've got to find out why the engine is lean and solve that problem. Then, we're going to swap the Yella Terra 1.7 rockers for a set of Yella Terra's second design 1.8s and see if they, too, can run to 6200 in a stable valve train. Following that, I'm not sure where we're going to go in the motor department. In fact, that might be the end of our engine mods.
As for other areas of the project? Well, for sure, I need to do something about our road test conditions. I'm not sure what that will be, but we gotta do something. I've, also, been looking at the 1-2 shift problem we have. I pulled the trans to look at the clutch and the clutch hydraulics. Found no obvious problems, but I machined the flywheel then changed the disc and clutch slave for good measure. Some road testing after the clutch session points at a trans with a damaged 1-2 synchro/dog clutch assembly and maybe a bent shift fork. After I repair our "fire damage" and solve the air-fuel ratio problem, then I'm going to get the trans apart for a damage assessment.
Now, because of the 10,000 char. limit on posts, I'm going to take up one specific comment made earlier in this thread in a second entry.
Ok, now....I want to specifically respond to one comment posted earlier in this thread.
They also had SLP 1.8 ratio rockers for a total lift of .549 on stock valve springs and got crazy valve float, well duh! They had their headers custom made when there are 3 companies that manufacture them? With hours upon hours of tuning they couldnt get rid of 4* of KR? No rearend upgrade with all this new power?
you must not be able to read 'cause, if you'd looked at the magazine, you'd know the valve springs we're using are Comp 26918s. The '918s were the highest tension single spring Comp had for 3800s at the time we installed them. They're 130 on the seat and 318 over the nose. Those here who actually know something about these engines will agree that's a pretty stout valve spring for an engine rev limited at 6200.
We used the SLP rockers because the Chief Engineer at SLP, Brian Reese, who's no longer with the company, told us that they'd be compatible with an aftermarket camshaft of the profile we were going to use. Obviously, he gave us inaccurate information because those rockers put the system into valve float in spite of 1) being lighter and 2) the spring pressure we were running. There were two solutions to the valve float: 1) less aggressive cam profile, 2) more spring pressure or 3) take some mass out of the valve train. As #1 and #2 were either not desirable or more difficult and we'd been talking to Yella Terra down in Australia about its new rocker design; we tried #3.
As for the headers? Well, back last summer when we looked for headers, there are three companies we found offering off-shelf headers for 3.8s in F-cars. There's RK Sport, but its header is going to be discontinued once stock runs out and may already be that way. We also looked at the Pacesetter header and one other, the name of which escapes me at this point. We chose to have Dawson Racing Headers make us a set because I felt Tom Dawson could produce a better product, his shop was close and I'd get a good look at what it takes to make headers. In addition Dawsons allowed us an easy bolt-up of the EGR connection on the #1 exhaust primary, whereas some of the other brands we looked at required bending the EGR tube or fabricating some kind of adapter. Lastly, these headers are "custom" only in the fact that they were the second set of 3.8 F-car headers (the first was his master) Dawson had made. At this point, he's got a master and, like other header companies, can make as many sets as people want.
Now the knock retard. Clearly, "shodown" knows little about calibration work on modified engines...well, ok, he knows maybe about as much as he reads on forum sites or in the user manual for HP Tuners.
The 3800 Series II V6 calibration, for a cal which was done in the late-90s, is actually pretty complex. It's easily as complicated as some of the latest C6 Vette stuff. To get 200-hp SAE net at the flywheel on 87-oct gas, with 195 deg. operating temperature, cast iron heads and the three-eight's combustion dynamics; GM calibrates right on the knock sensors. Anyone can see this if you drive a stocker around on 87-oct gas with a scan tester in the car. Get just a warm day and you'll see KR.
Of course, we're making our extra power--anywhere from 260 to 270 at the flywheel on the motor and 350 or so on nitrous from an engine originally at 200--with more cylinder pressure. When you add cylinder pressure you also increase (sometimes greatly increase) the engine's tendency towards detonation. That's why, even with a stock timing curve in a 3800 modified with that much more cylinder pressure, you're going to get detonation. You can mitigate that sitch somewhat by going to 91-octane a lower coolant temperature, but your limited to what you can do with those measures. During some of our cal tests, we even experimented with a curve retarded from stock right around peak torque as a hedge against KR.
What can make this sitch worse is valve noise. Use a cam with really aggressive ramps, you get a lot of valve noise. Now, when I say "valve noise", I mean exactly that: the noise the valve makes when it hits the seat. Some people misidentify this as lifter noise. Yeah, it kinda sounds like that, but when you use a listening device, you can hear the clacking really loud around the exhaust ports which happen to be the one area where a valve seat is closest to the exterior of the head. That noise is the exhaust valves hitting the seats and that noise is of a frequency similar to detonation.
When you have a lot of that noise, it's going to "fool" the knock sensors and you'll get "false" knock retard. You can run 120-oct gas and still have knock retard if it's false KR driven by valve noise. Even when you have a little bit of that noise, you still can have a problem, because even though it's not of an amplitude high enough to trigger the KS, when you mix a little valve noise and a little detonation and they have nearly the same frequencies, you end up with a lot of noise to which the KS is sensitive and, presto--more KR...perhaps more than you need.
Sure you can try to "desensitize" the KSes with tape or some other stupid trick or you can go into the cal and deactivate the KS system altogether but those are easy ways out....probably the way my new-best-friend, shodown, does it.
The 3800 V6, modified with a cam having aggressive ramps to the point that it makes a lot more cylinder pressure, is a difficult calibration challenge. Only those who lack cal knowledge and experience will say, "It's easy." We spent a lot of time trying to work a spark schedule that would be appropriate for a mod'ed engine but stay out of detonation and, at the end of the magazine part of the project, I thought we were there, but now, KR is back....rats!
My immediate goal is 225 at the wheels and no KR on 91-oct gas and that will probably come when I solve the AFR problems.
As for the rear end--right now, we don't need a stronger axle or a different ratio. If we do at a later date, then I'll make changes.
Lastly, the "custom made" thing, of which shodown and a couple others have been critical. That's a lot of bull**** from people who know little about the performance aftermarket. The only semi-custom pieces on that car are the cylinder head porting and the calibration work. The rest is all stuff anyone can buy. The cam profile can be had from Comp in about the same time as their catalog items and at no extra cost. All you gotta do is call Comp up. Even the heads and the calibration can be had by anyone who wants to go to the same vendors we used.
Seems to me it was an expensive dynoqueen with custom parts that didnt even work properly.
LOL
You and I will find ourselves a nice, test route, with some long straights mixed in with some curves (oh...they don't have them in Nebraska, do they) and we'll see whose car is a freakin' "dynoqueen". Now's a perfect time for you to visit. It'll get you out of all that damn cold weather you have in Omaha right now.
:)
In closing, "Fbody3400" said
It put down 290 to the wheels? Some stock LS1s do that, its easily a mid 13 car. With the right suspension, gears, and driving that could be an incredible car
Well, thanks Fbody3400. Yours was one of the intellegent comments, here. I think we've got the right suspension and gears at this point. I just need to find a better test venue and correct the lean air-fuel ratio.
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