New Drag Car hits the strip

I entered my new Drag car for the Holden vs Ford Drag racing event on the Anzac long weekend. As it’s a new car and still requiring Tech inspection, I wasn’t able to do too many quick runs, but for it’s 2nd event debut I am extremely happy with it’s progress.

The car is a Twin turbo 410ci Darton Sleeved LS2 in a VX Berlina Shell
9.674

9.510

engine-shot

LS1 VR Ute

Friday afternoon tune for Clayton Farmers “FARMIND” cam’d ls1 running a th400 trans & E85.  Built for burnouts.

clayton-vr

60lb injectors leave plenty of room for a future power adder

clayton2

 

Nice flat torque curve from this combo

Civic Racecar

I had someone from a local car forum I’m on ask me about taking a look at his civic which he races regularly at Wanneroo Raceway as he wasn’t happy with a recent tune-up after a cam swap.

So with some spare time on my hands today we put it on the dyno. What was apparent straight away was the car was running extremely rich from idle until “VTEC” was activated around 6000k rpm & was lacking in power at all rpm’s below.

Considering this is the first time I’ve ever done one of these motors/ecu combo’s & it only took a few short hours to sort out. We got some pretty good gains below the vtec change over point along with gains in fuel economy both at wide open throttle and normal throttle points.

civic

E85 Cruze Tuning

I spent some more time this weekend playing with the Cruze on the dyno again after installing a de-cat pipe along with the bigger injectors for running E85.
cruze-decatWith the new pipe in, exhaust note & noise is still the same. At least within the car.

Tuning wise it seems to have helped improve the power in the top end from fading, even though boost is still dropping away.

 

 

As always a dyno graph tells it like it is.
cruze-e85

Dyno Wideband Upgrade

With the LSM11 wideband sensors becoming quite costly and very outdated compared to the latest Bosch LSU 4.9 sensors, I decided to replace the factory Dyno Dynamics (Autronic) wideband with an ALM-LED that has both analog and serial output (along with a couple of inputs if required).

As such with a bit of digging and tracing the wires, the below information might come in handy for some one else looking to do the same. I simply made up a male DB9 connector to match the existing autronic cable from the dyno. I originally planned to replace the round connector at the dyno controller, but after ordering the wrong “AMP” connector size I went with the DB9 connector instead.

Original Autronic Wideband Connector Wiring:
Cable Colour – DB9 PIN # – Round Connector Pin # – Usage

Green – Pin 1,2 DB9 – Pin 1 – Power Ground

Brown – Pin 4 DB9 – Pin 4 – Sensor Ground

Red – Pin 5 DB9 – Pin 5 – 0-5V from Wideband to Dyno

Yellow – Pin 8 DB9 – Pin 8 – 0-1V output

White – Pin 6/7 DB9 – Pin 6 – 16v Supply from Dyno

Dyno software will either need to modified to suite a 10-20afr range if that’s what your wideband uses by default or you need to program your widebands analog output to the standard 10-30 afr range the Autronic uses.

widebandWith the new wideband sensor being able to read much leaner mixtures, the lambda value on the led display is pretty high. But testing on a car proved to be dead on accurate from the digital to analog lambda value.