This post isn't supposed to mean anything. I just had to show this photo of the Adams and Enriquez dragster with a turbocharged 392. The motor had been blown on gas making 850 HP. With the turbos it jumped to 1245 HP. Gene Adams is probably the best engine tuner ever and I honor him. This same car also ran a 291 Desoto hemi at over 200 MPH. Unblown and no tranny. Sometime back Don and Gene took it to a meet and ran against cars with as much as 440 cubes. There was some audible snickering over that old Desoto until they beat em all. Wonder who had the last laugh! Hats off!
So I have to ask, do you know what all else he did to the engine along with the blower to turbo swap to go from 850 to 1245 HP?
I don't think they had to do much at all. It's just the nature of the turbo. You can get a kit for the little 2.2 Dodge Neon ( 134 ) cubes that will make 575 HP. Turbos are nasty.
Right on! So that means turbos are traditional and I can put 'em on my '32 roadster and not get shunned here!!! Those big blowers have high parasitic losses. I wouldn't be surprised if back then a big blower on that motor ate up a few hundred hp just to drive the blower. OTOH, turbos don't have those losses, although depending on setup they can add more or less backpressure.
Their downside at the time was an extreem amout of "LAG" from the time the injectors opened to the time they started to create boost and tuning issues when dealing with altitude change simply because you couldnt just change a pulley when the air got bad.
A good friend raced drag boats and tells of K.S. Pittman running a turbo hemi in the fuel class and it was wicked. Don said that K.S. had a large boost gage and the needle was bent around the 30psi pin.
Gonna' say that's a different engine than the one at Ferguson's shop. Those heads look like earlier heads and obviously a different color engine, 331 or 354 heads. Maybe different turbos and the intake tubes where they connect to the turbos are different. But all that could have been changed at any point. I don't have a clear shot at the water ports on the front of the heads. Either way, it RULES!
Ive been wanting to build a turbo setup like this for my coupe for years! Dont think it would be a very street friendly setup though with mechanical injection and all though. Thank you all for the great close up shots! -Justin
For the drags you can get away with it, but for a street application I can't imagine not using an intercooler and that ads another whole set of packaging problems ...though the early GN Buicks were "hot air" cars.
Gene Adams is a bonafide bad ass. He built the engine in our car when I was on an NE1 team, and that thing ran like a top.
That was my thoughts exactly, would almost have to run an intercooler, and besides the obvious looks issue it would be a bear to tune and such for street use. I still cant get it out of my head though, so im sure I will be "experimenting" with it one day -Justin
I know EFI is not HAMB friendly, but tuning a Turbo is pretty easy these days if you run EFI. I have a non HAMB friendly car that is my Wife's Daily Driver with 2.4L (146 Cu In) that puts down 380 HP on a chassis dyno. And she drives it to work from Spring thru Fall. On its current setup and tune it has over 50K miles on it with nothing more than Oil Changes every 3K.
2 turbos vs 1 blower = 400 HP increase. Intercooler = more but how much is enough. Is he just dumping the exhaust out of the Turbo ?
A Hot Air car is fine on the street, especially if you are building a V-8. With a V-8 you have enough Cubes to make good HP without a lot of boost. You can build a nice 500 HP V8 Turbo with 5 Lbs of boost and no intercooler. Intercoolers are mandatory when you get up to 25 to 40 LBS OF BOOST (and higher) The other thing on a street application is you will not be in high boost for very long periods of time, unless you are in Germany on the Autobahn of course. But for the 10-20 seconds you are in the throttle a simple water/Meth injection would be fine. Sure you would be leaving HP on the table by limiting boost, but how much can you really use on the street? All the 6-71 supercharged motors are running "Hot Air" at lower boost levels on the street and they do fine.
like murfman, I too have a non HAMB'ish EFI inline 6 in one of my other cars, 186 c.i., twin turbos (GT2860's) and it cranks out over 700hp on 93 oct pump gas at 22 psi (spraying 50/50 meth/water for charge air cooling) and a quite wide power band to boot from ~ 2500 rpm to over 8000 rpm. Runs like a good OEM setup.
Ah yes I never thought about a water/Meth setup, that would solve that issue and be easy to hide. EFI would make the setup easy to do, but mechanical injection would be the way to go to keep the car "correct" per say. I also never really thought about the comparison to blowers. Like you say 500hp would be easy to achieve at low boost so wouldnt need a lot of fancy modern technology to make that happen. -Justin
No way is there 400 HP worth of parasitic drag on that 850 on gas engine. Modern top fuelers might have around 400 drag from the blower.
My shop teacher from school worked on a modern top fuel crew and I always herd him say it takes like 1000-1500hp to spin the blower on a fuel car of today. -Justin
Quick google search came up with this: "The engine in a typical Top Fueler displaces 500 cubic inches and produces about 7,500 horsepower. Of that 7,500 horsepower, it takes about 900 just to turn the supercharger." So I was a bit off, not saying any of this is concrete fact though. -Justin
jw, your shop teacher is correct as to the H.P. requirements to turn a modern T/F blower- are close to 1000 H.P., It's not just turning the blower, but forcing and compressing or pressurizing the air and fuel as well. By using calculations from things such as 60' times, 330' times, wheel speed, blower speed, boost, % Nitro, additional weight carried from days past, etc, etc, crew cheifs now estimate Top Fuel H.P. calculations to be WELL over the 10,000- possibly the 12,000 H.P. mark. TR
That's very old information. Based off of fuel consumption and equations calculated with the torque meter hooked to the drive shaft, current NHRA top fuel rails are estimated to be well over the 10,000 - 11,000 pony range. Edit: TR beat me to it!
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