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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