What's the going price for...
I knew you’d been up in that area on W stuff. Would you tend to agree that no engine ever with a w2 strip dominator has ever even been to 9000 rpm? I mean even if you money shift one from 2 back to 1 it ain’t gone get up there.
Put enough spring on it and it might. There just isn’t enough area to get that rpm and make any power doing it.
There is a huge difference between making an engine hit an rpm number and making it make power there.
I was WAY younger then. I grew up on Modified Production cars. I still once in a while go on YouTube and watch some old MP video and it’s like I am back in 1977, with a National Dragster in my hand and looking at the indexes and class records and doing the math.
There is something special about an NA, small displacement, high rpm clutch car. They used to use 50 pound flywheel and they’d smack the tire with it. I damn near cried when NHRA killed the Eliminator.
Then, I had hope again when NHRA brought out Pro Stock Truck. I don’t really get excited about trucks but it was high rpm, carburetor and gasoline, clutch small blocks. So I was all in.
And then the asshats in Glendora killed that class too. I know one of the main reasons (two actually) that I learned from a well known racer standing in the staging lanes at Woodburn Dragstrip but I keep it to myself. It would sound like name dropping but I know what I was told and I consider that source unimpeachable.
So no, there is no way on this earth a single 4 on any head we are talking about is going 9k. If it did the power curve would be maybe 600 rpm and you’d need 10 gears to get it down the track.
Or, it would be so far past peak power at 9k a Prius would smoke t like a Philly blunt.
RPM is a ***** of a taskmaster. I will say it’s much easier today with bigger cam cores, bigger lifters, better springs and of course far better cylinder heads.
Darin Morgan calls it the tuning pyramid but I’ve always called it the tune up window. As rpm goes up, the tuning pyramid (or whatever he calls it as that may be incorrect) gets smaller at the tip. I say the tuneup window gets smaller and smaller.
Even at 8500 with today’s parts you have a really small tuning window and an even smaller margin for error. Something as simple as a valve spring dropping more than 10% and you don’t catch it, you’ll be fixing ****. And it won’t be cheap.
A couple degrees of timing and the rings are done. And the tuning window for the clutch is just as small.
Thinking about it, Im just not as young as I once was. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat as long as I wasn’t writing the checks. To do it out of my own pocket? Never again.
Im equally as happy with a mid 11 second street car that I can drive anywhere I want to go than a high 8 second, relatively small inch drag car.