Cool Project. Definitely subscribed

 

cant wait to see the result!

 

Update - only text today..

The progress of getting the engine to fit in the 360 begins. We took the aluminum engine frame from the 360 and placed it in the engine bay of the 430 - perfect fit. They are excactly the same. Same mounting points for the frame, and the gearbox mount is the same as well. This gives us high hopes for the ease of the swap.

On a more serious note, we can see that the 430's engine bay seems to be packing a lot more heat than the 360. We have stumbled on the following differences that we need to have a closer look at:

The stock 430 headers contains a "pre-cat" before the actual catalysator. Thats one more than in a 360, and a cat in the manifold creates a lot of heat. To counter this, we are currently in the process of ordering a set of aftermarket headers. More info will follow. We hope to gain serious power from this as well.

Even more disturbing though, is the fact that it seems that the 430 doesnt seem to have a seperate radiator for cooling the engine oil. The oil is cooled by the water, making it the water radiators up front that handles all cooling of the engine (water, oil and transmission fluids). This is radically different from the 360 (the 360 challenge at least) which has a huge radiator sitting above the right rear wheel, cooled by the right cooling duct behind the door handle.

The above difference with the oil/water radiators means that the 430 gets it cold intake air from both sides, meaning it can probably produce higher pressure in the intake manifold, and get more fresh cold air. The 360 only gets it intake air from the left side because of the radiator mounted on the right. We will have a look at what to do about all this. We have to make something custom, perhaps an extra air intake, as we would like to have both air intakes from both sides to gain the best ram-air effect, AND a seperate radiator for the oil.

Another difference from 360 to 430 is the transition from timing belts to timing chains. This makes the proportions of the engine a bit different up front, and also seems to have the effect that we wont be able to mill as much of the cylinder heads as we would like, to increase compression. (Im sorry if this doesnt make any sense, but is has to do that the front engine cover, which also houses the alignment devices for the heads, is radically different from a 360.)

Also, the generator is now placed between the cylinder rows, below the intake manifold. This is only a hassle because we tend to change the generators of the 360 quite often - we go through 'em quite quickly when racing. The new position makes it take a lot longer to change - we hope the new generation has better durability.

I hope you found todays post interesting, although it was a bit more on the technical side.

 

You will only see a ram air effect after 140mph. In fact a prostock car with all of the engineering that goes into the hood scoop only sees .8-1.2 lbs of "boost" pressure greater than atmospheric in the intake.

 

Very interesting. I actually thought we would see an effect already at 80-100 mph.. My impression was that bikes use this concept alot, and has effect from it a bit earlier. Nonetheless, we still want to make sure that the engine gets plenty of fresh air, and that we get plenty of cool air into the engine bay, to keep the temps of everything down - temperature and weight is a real focus area for us in this build.

Question: Does anyone know the differences there is in the Scuderia transmission making it shift faster? If it is only the clutch and programming, we might take a shot at getting faster shifts as well...

 

Great project! Can't wait to see the final result!