16th February 2009
 

 

   
   
   
   
   
   
 
The F6 has been built except for paint in house, and Dave has done most of it himself. There has been very little that could not be reproduced in your house garage with fairly normal hand tools and at the prices we have said. Included in the pricing was all our Nizpro stage two gear at normal retail prices.

The wheels are Aluma Star forged alloy race wheels and weigh in at 5kgs each and fitted with 4x25 inch Hoosier front runners, total weight of tyre and wheel is 10 kgs compared with 35 for the standard 17 inch alloy that you see fitted to the rear.

We haven’t yet purchased the rear wheels however they should be 15 by 10.5 inch same brand. We are still deciding on off set. Firstly we will run the car with a completely stock rear suspension set up, leaving us to run a 17 x8.5 inch wheel and a 275 drag/ street tyre like many of you run when going to the drags.

Dave is weighting for me to get by bum into gear and modify the standard IRS. I have started to fit up small coil over units from an R6 Yamaha road bike, these are very light and have a very close spring and damper rate due to the motion ratio on the bike and our F6 being about 200kgs lighter that the standard car.

It give us the ability to run both shock and spring inboard of the wheel well giving us enough room to fit a 10.5 inch slick with IRS. The R6 Yamaha damper and spring assemble are cheap to purchase from motorcycle wreakers and offer a large degree of adjustment and are super good quality, normally 300 to 400 dollars buys a pair. I do need to add a mount or too and modify the control blade, so there is a day or twos work involved.

The last hard part is making a complete under tray fro the car to help lower drag, Dave is very keen on this and should help with top speed, and he also wants to take it to the speed trials for a top speed run at some time after its done some drag work.

With us just starting to get on top of all the normal work, we should now get some time back to finish this project off; it’s a fair balancing act, work, home life and special projects. However any one taking on this project from home would find the same restraints.

Windows are getting tinted tomorrow, then paint polished and finally sticker’d up in sponsors colors. Should look like the real thing within next week or two.

As far as private testing goes, this will depend on Heathcoat and what happens to it. We would like to run it privately as although this has always been about a cheap do it your self project and what goes wrong I will report, there will always be people out there ready to pounce if it is a slower than they expect which I’m sure is anything less than 5’s . Really low 10’s are going to be about it for the first few outings.
 
January 2009
 
Ok the drag car project is getting closer....

Over the break Dave with a tiny bit of help from me, and I mean tiny!, got the car going and it drove out into the car park on its own for the first time yesterday.

What now needs to be done is the following. Not in the following order

1. Finish alloy fuel tank
2. Make and fit complete flat bottom under tray
3. Chassis dyno tuning.
4. Transmission oil cooler.
5. Wash and polish.
6. Sign writting.
7. Fit new rear shock and spring assemblies.
8. Private testing.
9. Fit tacho and shift light.

So there is still a bit to do, however Dave is fairly keen now that it’s up and running and I hope that we are not far off.

Now; originally we had a goal finished weight of 3000 lbs with drivers and we have not quite made this. After scaling it yesterday we came in at 3215lbs with me sitting in it. Remembering this is with the standard XR6T wheels and tyres with all glass windows and steel body work. Total budget has come in at around 24k. So the plan now is to firstly run the car at this weight and later replace windows with lexson then add light weight wheels.
Later we may go to carbon bonnet and boot lid to get the weight back to the original goal.

It will be interesting to see what the weight does to the time card.

Anyway we should have some chassis dyno sheets within a couple of weeks. I'm not expecting huge numbers as we have fitted a 3000 rpm converter straight up rather than dynoing it with the standard speed converter first. I would think mid 370’s will be all we see at the wheels.

Stay tuned and make sure to check back here first for the latest!!!!!

Simon G
 


While the body was away getting painted, we’ve been hard at work on the engine for the 1300NIZPRO drag car. To recap for those of you who came in late or don’t remember,
this is a standard F6 engine with a stage two Nizpro Plus pack. The last time we ran the engine to make sure that a standard engine would hang together we used a MoTeC M800 ECU to tune it, as during development it is quicker to get live date and tuning for quick changes. We also use the MoTeC for our training seminars as we can change fuel and timing values live and quickly to
show the effects that this can have on engine exhaust temperatures, detonation and power levels. For this reason alone the MoTeC is good value.

Now as we went to press a few months ago the engine had recorded a peak horsepower reading of 679hp or approximately 507rwkW. We were happy enough with this and put it to rest while we went on to FG development.

 

Anyway, with the drag car not so far away we decided to put the engine back on the dyno and this time map it using the factory ECU as we want to know exactly what the engine would make on the engine dyno in the identical trim it would go in the car. So over the last couple of days Dave and I have been mucking around on the engines tune, eventually managing to extract a figure of 708hp and over 1000Nm of torque. That’s 30hp more than we had made previously on any standard internal F6 engine.


I still don’t think that this is the end of the power race and have a few extra tricks left. What’s funny is how all of us chase numbers and the original goals change once we get there. Originally I said to Dave that 700 would be stacks and yet now we are there I think 735 is achievable.
Why is that? Well if you have been keeping up with my posts on the Nizpro forum regarding Turbo’s and recommended flow rates you may remember that I said the standard XR6T BA-BF compressor wheel has a flow rating of approximately 62lbs per minute. Garrett suggest that a pound of air flow will give approximately 10hp and rate the XR6T turbo at 600hp.

 

Using a non genuine Ford 0.70 AR compressor cover, up from the standard Ford 0.50 AR comp cover, 650hp is thought to be about it and fits in with the 10hp per lb rule. Well at 708hp we are already looking at 11.4hp per pound. So I think with a few extra external mods we can expect 11.8hp per pound or 735hp. Remember that these numbers are all engine dyno numbers, not rear wheel numbers though.

 

At the moment it works out to around 447rwkWs using our 102mm exhaust system and a few development parts that may be added to the stage two plus pack soon. It’s also doing it running straight pump fuel. Next we’ll fit the dyno engine back into the car and get some rwkW figures first using a standard torque converter and then a larger converter.


It’s been quite a while since we went looking for every last horsepower using the stage two kit on the engine dyno with a standard engine and we have certainly made some progress. I believe there will be some updates to the Stage two plus pack in the pipeline for customers
once we have finished with this engine. The biggest gain has been the new exhaust system and
a few mods to the air intake. The air intake has worked very well up to the 710hp point in the past before we noticed a slight hold up, and this is where some of the gains have been made on this engine.

 

We’ve also been looking at ways to improve low end response for some time and have made very good gains with changes to the inlet side of the engine. On a static pull test (in other

words full throttle at 2000rpm) this engine previously made 130hp and the maximum possible boost at this point is 6.4psi. With the new mod boost levels rise to 12psi and power to 196hp at the same rpm. In turns of drag racing times this will only have aminor effect, although the improved bottom end pull will allow a smaller stall speed, resulting in less torque converter slip and a few extra MPH on your trap speed.

 

Can you tell I’m excited? More torque than an AMG SL65 Black all from a standard taxi engine. We’re looking forward to what’s coming next, and you should be too…

 

Words: Simon Gishus

Pics: Jason Freeman


This month we’ll be looking at the engine that will be used to power the drag car during the first stages of this project. As the whole concept of this project is to develop a 10-second or better vehicle using the smallest amount of cash, the fact that our stolen and recovered XR6 came with a running engine made for the obvious starting point. However, knowing what condition it was in seemed to be a good idea rather than having an expensive and avoidable failure, so it was decided that the best thing to do was to remove the engine, strip and view the internals. In the middle of 2006, all of Ford’s turbo motors in the XR6T / Typhoon / Territory family were standardised using the heavier duty connecting rods and heavy duty valve springs that were the two main weak links with this engine in the early series BA and BF Mk1’s.

Being an early 2003 spec Barra engine ours had the small connecting rods and weaker valve springs fitted, and since the car was going to be turned into an F6 R spec Typhoon, these were replaced with the standard engine parts that would be fitted to the Typhoon motor. So the late model connecting rods were fitted, as were Nizpro valve springs, replacing the problematical early engine items.

Remembering the brief of this project as a budget this would seem to go against our goals, but in this case we had F6 rods in stock that had been removed from one of our development engines and we simply used these.

Now when the car hits the track the engine will be classed as being in standard unopened form.

What does this mean? While still using all the internal factory components it is our belief it is an “unopened” engine even though we have stripped it clean, checked and reassembled it using standard parts.

Another way to accomplish a similar result would be to purchase a Ford spare parts F6 crate short engine from our sponsors Etheridge Ford spare parts. The engine was reassembled with no extra balancing and only machining of the cylinder block and head surface. The interesting part of the engine build is how simple this has all been. I could waffle on for pages about all the “magic” that we performed putting together this motor, however in the first case this is about how simply we could do it and secondly the fact is that with some careful assembly this is some thing that most people could do in their home garage.

Once the engine was assembled it was connected to our in-house engine dyno for engine tuning and calibration. Most of you will be familiar with a chassis dyno and this would be the most common way of getting your car tuned (we do 8–10 XR6T’s every week).

So why did we choose this more complicated route? There are a number of reasons.

Firstly, the drag car will be fitted with a hi-stall torque converter and this makes tuning the bottom end of the rev range very difficult; with the engine dyno the engine is directly connected straight to the dyno so a very accurate tune can be performed. It also gives us the ability to modify engine parts like the exhaust system and intercooler set up with great ease as they don’t need to fit perfectly into the car during testing so more can be learnt in less time.

We also decided to calibrate the engine with different configurations. Stage one two and three. These consisted of different exhaust systems, waste gates and our Nizpro Cobra intake manifold.
Lastly, the engine dyno gives us the convenience of calibrating the engine using a water to air intercooler which is thermostatically controlled so it enable us to tune the engine at all different intake temperatures which in turns gives us maximum power at any given intake temperature. We often do this for very good calibration data that we can then use for customers on their normal road cars but this was a great opportunity to revisit what we have done previously.

The end result using a Nizpro stage 2 plus kit was 507kW (679hp). Once the car is ready we will refit the engine and run it on the chassis dyno to check if the cars systems are up to the task along with determining the rear wheel kilowatts figure. This will also show the percentage figure
that’s often talked about in regards to driveline losses.

Words: Simon Gishus

Pics: Jason Freeman
 

 


 

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