The History of My Car & Engine

from Rally Bashing Hack to Weekend Racer

STAGE 2 - Racing The Boys At Uni

I then got serious.  I thought if I am going to mod this engine, and make any decent gains, I want to be able to measure it, so I bought a G-Tech accelerometer to measure 1/4 mile times and trap speeds.  A 19 second quarter mile was a great time to improve upon.  It didn't really matter about the launch, it wouldn't wheel spin much but I couldn't improve the time by launching harder.  It would just chirp then bog down.  Severe lack of power.

Off came the head, cant really remember why exactly, I was playing with bikes at the time and had been shaving their heads, so it was probably just to give it a shave to increase the compression ratio.  I had not long before bought a die grinder, so I thought I'd do a bit of porting at the same time.  I cleaned up the ports, removing casting marks, just trying  to make everything bigger.  It was a TD head, so had the same size ports and valves as the "big valve" TX heads.  I don't think they changed at all until the TE models that introduced the EGR valve and extra pollution control gear.  

The manifolds were off so I gave them a port match, taking the ports out to the size of the gaskets on both manifolds and the head.  That was with both the stock inlet manifold and the factory cast iron exhaust manifold.  Probably wasting my time there.  I suppose every little bit helps.  

Not long after, I bought a second hand muffler off a mate, and got a new exhaust fitted.  It was 2.25" press bent, and I fitted some Genie 4-2-1 extractors at the same time.  6500-7000 rpm was a common occurrence, and it sounded loud enough to be fast.  It was putting out a little bit more power,  but I think that the muffler was a pretty bad unit, it was noisy and restrictive.  It was 2.25" pipe though, so for a 1600, it probably wasn't too bad overall.

The car was great for burnouts, the single spinner diff meant I kept having to replace the right rear tyre.  I found fresh retreads make great tyre smoke, and burnout competitions were a weekly event at uni, especially in the uni car park on Friday nights.  

So the mods so far, slightly more compression, mild port job, port matched stock inlet manifold, 4-2-1 extractors and 2.25" exhaust.  This engine combo was doing mid 17's on the drag strip with my G-Tech.

Check out STAGE 3 - High Compression, Lumpy Cam, Weber Fed Screamer!