With RWD, you’re making all that horsepower up front, but you’ve got to make it do a 90-degree turn to spin those tires. That’s got to be hard on the mechanism — downright brutal in any kind of racing. Here’s how to get started putting the pieces back together, and a set-up shortcut, too.
Is tuning an engine for maximum performance and/or fuel efficiency an art or a science? We’ll cover the basic and specialty tools every tuner should have in his/her tool box.
Whenever people see a carburetor-equipped supercharged engine in a hot vehicle, they can’t help noticing how impressive it looks, and they wonder how much power it produces. But they also see an engine they think is almost impossible to tune, is not very reliable, and will overheat at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t have to be that way.
So far we’ve looked at the components that supply the pinching force and the ones that spin off all that heat. Here we’ll talk about the interesting subject of lining “recipes” and what you should choose for your hot car or truck.
Last time, we looked at the parts that provide the pinch, but the components that spin off all that thermal energy are more interesting from a scientific, technological standpoint.
When it comes to racing, initially large chunks of horsepower are made and lap times drop quickly on that first day at the track. By day three, the improvements have dropped to 0.1 second if you’re lucky. Will lightening your flywheel give better lap times — or just another 0.1 second? And will the car still be “streetable” after this mod?
What you use in your day-to-day career, no matter how high-quality, is necessarily different from what you need for high-performance work, in this case engine building.
