SCCA Camaro

The head swap and manifold porting paid dividends in that the torque curve of the motor was shifted down about 500 RPM and car pulled from about 1700 RPM rather than the previous 2200 RPM.  I’m sure the extra weight off the front of the car didn’t hurt the handling characteristics either, and since I was building an autocrossing car for SCCA Solo II, the weight reduction off the front of the car was a major motivator in helping to improve weight distribution.  Still running a cast iron intake though…gotta get rid of that dead weight!

One issue with timing as high as 14 degrees initial was that with the headers on the car, the starter motor got fairly heat soaked while running and then hot starts became a problem.  There’s nothing worse than showing up in your badass Camaro, making a lot of noise, stopping to top of the gas, and not being able to get the car started afterward!  So I ordered a little blanket for my starter motor from eBay, and this helped a little in that I was at least able to start the motor when hot, even though I had to crank it for a few seconds (not very cool).  I did something about it a little later, and will discuss it in a future blog.

I had messed with the timing a bit in an effort to move the engine’s torque curve down the RPM band.  Since the cam was still an unknown, I was pretty much guessing and trying to determine by seat of the pants if I had improved performance.  Fortunately I didn’t have to determine the performance entirely by seat of the pants because my Dakota Digital meter had a built-in 0-60 time calculator.  What I found was that the car liked 12-14 degrees of initial timing on the HEI distributor for good behavior off the line.  I found that I was getting 0-60 times in the 5.8 second range with this timing.  Higher PRM suffered a bit but for the street and SCCA this seemed like a good compromise.  Unfortunately there are no places anywhere near where I live here on Oahu where one can do a bunch of back-to-back 0-60 runs adjusting the timing one degree at a time to determine the best setting.  Particularly tragic is that they closed our drag race track here (see www.buildthetrack.com for more info).