54 Chevy 383 Healey 100 - Cartoon Channel

When 97-99 RON is just not enough

In my eternal search for more power and less pinking I came across this very interesting site. My particular problem is 11:1 compression and I was researching octane boosters and this popped up



Then we get to find out all about Tolulene here

www.gnttype.org/techarea/misc/octaneexplained.html

Interestingly tolulene in bulk is only £1.85 a litre and racing methanol is just over a pound a litre but may eat your rubber piping.

I think I'm going to get my Junior Chemistry Set out and have a play over the winter.

Obviously it's all at your own risk ;D

Yep, I'm going to be careful. The house insurance doesn't cover making rocket fuel in the kitchen and that means SWMBO will have to be out. My mix is going to be basic against that of ''Mac' Hulbert's which he runs in his 1935 supercharged ERA 5B. He uses a ‘magic’ formula of 80% Methanol, 10% Benzol, 10% Petrol and 4% of Acetone per gallon. Nope it doesn't add up but neither does the performance of his car. Below is a picture of one of his launches and I swear that he can get all four wheels off the ground sometimes. You can almost smell the Castrol R from here ;D

There was a very specific smell when I was chasing his times up the Westmount Hillclimb the next day! It rather came from my nether regions as I overshot the stopping area and nearly took out the traffic cop stopping normal traffic coming the other way ;D Iain Hunt in our group had brake problems, got into a slide and removed his front offside suspension on the granite walls either side of the track

For your interest I enclose a contemporary report of the first day where 'Mac' showed us all a clean pair of heels and continued to do so for the rest of the meeting. The man is a legend

Ah but Cobras are just johnny-come-lately, wannabe Healey V8s ;D Take a look at the oldest conversion still running here at www.britishv8.org/Other/TomSchnerk.htm

First AC Cobra was 1961 and it's probably inconceivable with the spate of Healey V8 conversions racing in the late 1950's that Carroll Shelby didn't come across them

Wonder where he got the idea for an American engined small British sports car

OOOOOHHHHH!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D That'S going to make a wonderfull noise!

That's some serious induction porn right there. Pure eye candy for petrol heads.

Your car has always sounded amazing anyway, but I simply cannot wait to hear it running these bad boys! Nice one Ian, Christmas has indeed some early for you, but with the awesome work you've been putting in this year, you more than deserve it.

Please say Hi to Mrs FrankenHealey too (Vin? if I recall?? My memory is awful!!) and I wish you both a wonderful Christmas. Bruce.

Ha ha ;D

Boy you are gonna have some fun with those

I luuuuurve carbs now

We used to run various methanol and toluene mixes when I used to build/run/race support, various vintage Rileys ('The White Riley=ERA Genesis fyi). It always made me giggle that i've seen Mark Gillies (my ex bosses son) in R3A outdrive Mac in R4D many times despite R4d having an estimated 70-100 bhp more from it's enormous Zoller blower, skill wins over power.....

just adding 20% toluene to petrol (we used super obv most of the time) increases the resistance to knock hugely, much better than any propriety octance booster, we had one engine running 13:1 happily on his combo, and thats with 19'30 cylinder head design!

Also ran a few cars of pure methanol and avgas, never had any problems as long as you drain the tank and carbs after every race... also avgas needs quite hot plus to run for long periods, for some reason I found it fouls colder and race plugs quite easily..

If you consider running pure methanol remember you cant use regular oils (as far as I know) we used to use castrol M (castor based) which is amazing stuff, but coats everything with a disgusting gummy mess which only methanol will remover (spent days scrubbing bare aluminium bodied race cars with buckets of methanol, not fun)

It's something like that. My problem is that I do mostly classic events like Cholmondeley and Jersey Festival so I have to 'look' right. Nobody is going to let me in with injection and coil packs because they are not period correct otherwise I'd have done it long ago. So what the Revenue and Customs are probably holding onto is a Mallory MaxFire which is electronic ignition with a capacitive discharge system with programmable advance and vacuum built-in. It also comes with a 3 bar MAP sensor so I nearly get the advantages of Megajolt but it looks like a distributor ;D

The plan is to improve the breathing over the little 650cfm Edelbrock (not difficult) to get some more BHP (hopefully) with the Webers and then spend the next year lightening the car (ally or carbon panels maybe) so I can squeeze into the 500 bhp per ton nasp category.

I might then be ready to have a go at VMax with a few aerodynamic tricks