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Honey Badger's road course prep conversion thread and adventures

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exciting. Which waton? Also the fp30s uses the stock oil cooler and location for their dif cooler and run an lines up there.

Just the Watson S550 Road Race kit. They sell a ready-to-weld cage kit.

And yep - I looked into mimicking that a while back, but I'd rather move stuff backwards instead of forwards for weight distribution and reducing drag on the front end due to so many coolers.
 
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Engine is boxed up and getting picked up by R&L tomorrow. For those interested, engine is on an engine stand that’s bolted down to the pallet. Box built around it.

To ship it, I reached out to MPR and asked if they’d arrange a pickup — while I was getting quoted $550+ myself, Tim’s business account was $325.

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741
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Things have been moving along slowly. As seen above, all the pistons showed signs up melting due to oil burn. Tim believes that because oil burns like a torch, the oil burn is likely what melted the pistons. No signs that it was from the tune. A combination of the type of leak (consistent, through the valve stems) allowed a consistent burn. New pistons have been ordered

As far as the oil leak itself, looks like the valve stems are undersized a bit as a result of being over polished. Heads were taken to a different shop yesterday so Tim could use his buddies more power vacuum checking machine to run some additional tests. In the meantime, Tim has contacted US Seal about getting custom seals made.
 
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Engine is finally done and getting shipped back. Made some changes for V2 (new pistons, valve package, balancer, and VCT delete). Should be interesting to see how much we lose with the VCT delete and if it's something I can live with. Will post all the engine details once I get it back and have all the paper work so I don't get anything wrong and get roasted for it :)151308580_3823787394311456_7257565278209389823_o.jpg
 
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Not gonna roast you for it...but I’d pass on the ATI damper. YTMMV.

I've been back and forth so many times on this, it's insane. I barred it from the V1 build due to the horror stories. Tim recommended it heavily, but I still pushed back. When he took it apart for the refresh, he advised me again to reconsider based on bearing wear. He says his engines have less bearing wear when using the ATI damper--including the Voodoo. I caved this time after a few more recent Voodoo builds he's done have had good luck with them.

We'll see what happens.
 
Engine is finally done and getting shipped back. Made some changes for V2 (new pistons, valve package, balancer, and VCT delete). Should be interesting to see how much we lose with the VCT delete and if it's something I can live with. Will post all the engine details once I get it back and have all the paper work so I don't get anything wrong and get roasted for it :)View attachment 62701
Nice. What RPM are you looking to rev up to?
 
741
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Nice. What RPM are you looking to rev up to?

We'll see what the dyno tells us, but I'll likely put the limiter at 8400 or so and plan to shift at peak power around 7700 rpm. Cams will likely level off around 7700 anyways - so anything above that is just to avoid a shift. She should be good north of 9k, tho
 
We'll see what the dyno tells us, but I'll likely put the limiter at 8400 or so and plan to shift at peak power around 7700 rpm. Cams will likely level off around 7700 anyways - so anything above that is just to avoid a shift. She should be good north of 9k, tho
Sweet. Did they upgrade the cam caps?

Just asking because I have a similar build (5.2, 13:1, locked vct) that broke 3 cam cap within 2h of runtime.
 
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Sweet. Did they upgrade the cam caps?

Just asking because I have a similar build (5.2, 13:1, locked vct) that broke 3 cam cap within 2h of runtime.

Damn. That sucks! What cap was used on yours? How'd come apart?

Side note, did you happen to get a dyno graph of it before it went boom?
 
Damn. That sucks! What cap was used on yours? How'd come apart?

Side note, did you happen to get a dyno graph of it before it went boom?

Broke at the thinnest point and broke both bolt holding it. It was the stock cam cap from my Boss302 engine. They did put new factory bolts when reassembling the heads.
Engine builder was surprised that they broke at that power level as they see them breaking in the 1500=hp range but thinks the cams were too aggressive.

Video from my tuner for his channel. Skip to 4:38 for the dyno number
 

Fabman

Dances with Racecars
6,519
8,155
Exp. Type
W2W Racing
Exp. Level
20+ Years
Pleasanton: 1/2 way between Sonoma and Laguna Seca
Broke at the thinnest point and broke both bolt holding it. It was the stock cam cap from my Boss302 engine. They did put new factory bolts when reassembling the heads.
Engine builder was surprised that they broke at that power level as they see them breaking in the 1500=hp range but thinks the cams were too aggressive.

Video from my tuner for his channel. Skip to 4:38 for the dyno number
Damn that's good power.
 
741
1,075
TX
Broke at the thinnest point and broke both bolt holding it. It was the stock cam cap from my Boss302 engine. They did put new factory bolts when reassembling the heads.
Engine builder was surprised that they broke at that power level as they see them breaking in the 1500=hp range but thinks the cams were too aggressive.

Video from my tuner for his channel. Skip to 4:38 for the dyno number

that’s a bizarre failure for sure. Whered it blow? On track? Catastrophic?

awesome power, as Sal said. Great for a VCT delete motor.
 
that’s a bizarre failure for sure. Whered it blow? On track? Catastrophic?

awesome power, as Sal said. Great for a VCT delete motor.
It was on track. The first cap put an airline crack in the valve cover and spilling oil everywhere. Kept running it as I thought it was only blowby. Only 1h later when it broke the second and third that I felt the lost of power and parked the car.

So far looks like only the cams were damaged. It broke the fingers for the sensor reading but they will need to be checked for runout.
The head should be fine according to the builder. They just going to install the MMR cap and line bore the heads and check that nothing got damaged in the bottom end.

It's hard to tell if the VCT delete is impacting much since there so much difference in power compared to the old engine. And with the 9000 rev line I'm able to keep the 3.73 instead of switching to 3.55
 
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Made a few tweaks to prep before dropping the engine back in the car.

First, I swapped out the UPR billet valve cover to AN fitting for my peterson breather. It just never sealed the way I wanted with the AL GT500 covers. Worked great on the plastic ones, weirdly. Could be the heavier duty hose I'm using now just added stress. Either way, I had an aluminum bung welded on to both covers. Nice and stable now.

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Second, by far the most time-consuming part to installing/removing the motor was the damn exhaust removal. The ARH system uses all slip joints and they can be a REAL pain to break loose due to the extreme heat cycles. Added some v-bands at the collectors that should make it as easy as pie. Nice!

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Hopefully we'll be starting tomorrow or Saturday. Fingers crossed!
 
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So update. The VCT-delete created a huge fiasco on the tuning front. Lots of tuners passed/refused to tune. Fortunately, I found someone reputable to work with and we got it dialed in. Took the car to the dyno today, finished break-in and did 10 or so runs to dial in the E85 and VP100 tunes. Since many are curious about the VCT-delete, I'll approach it from that perspective.

So data is in! It's not great, but it's not terrible!

So to get it out of the way, apologies for the poor format for comparing. The reality is these were done 2 years apart, on 2 different dynos, with 2 different tuners. I just didn't have the ability to control these variables, unfortunately.

So this top image is for the motor with VCT back in 2018 right after the first rebuild. Runs breakdown as E85(top), VP100 (middle), and 93 tunes (bottom) I had for your average track day. These were quite conservative.

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This image is from today with the cams locked out at 120 for the exhaust and 112 for the intakes.
dyno_hb_vct-lockouts-png.png


As you can (sort of) see, the big differences are in the drop off at the very top and between 3,500 and 5,500. With VCT, we have about 360ish hp around 4,500. Without VCT, we're only around 320ish. Pretty big loss. And then there's the huge torque loss under 5k. Ha! But 5700-7600 is pretty similar. I'll keep reviewing and digging and share more.

Most of this is not a surprise. The main surprise was the dip up top. Notice how the VCT graph doesn't climb above 7600, but it stays level. Comparatively the VCT-delete motor falls off a decent amount from 7,500-8k. The tuner felt that we could move that up with some adjustment on the cams. I told Tim to optimize power where the stock cams make power and that's what I think we're seeing. Aftermarket cams could help fix this.

Hot takeaway: I am quite pleased how smooth the the pulls are given the lockouts. I expected a much bigger hitch around 5-6k. It's quite smooth. I'll be very curious to see what this motor feels like on track. Objectively it's pretty clearly worse, but my limited driving so far makes it feel like it's not as bad as I expected. Either way, we'll see what happens on Saturday on track :)
 

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