Something Wicked This Way Comes…
After a nuclear meltdown early this season that made the guys from Chernobyl jealous, it was time to retire “Frank” the engine I’ve been running in the Nova since 2007. Frank served me well but he was seriously out of date compared to what the other guys in X275 are running. You just can’t run with the new stuff with 11 year old parts, specifically heads that is. Since I melted #2 & #8 chambers down in our old original Sniper Heads, it was time to step up our game finally.
We chose to stay with Pro-Filer Performance Products and decided to go with the new Sniper XL 224 series Conventional Port heads. Designed by Darren Morgan, these heads were specifically built from the ground up for Heavy Nitrous X275 competition, and unlike SR20’s, they can weigh in at conventional head weights. Everywhere I’ve asked, nobody knew what these heads would do on a 582 Nitrous Engine, those that do run them ain’t talking I guess… That’s either a good sign or a bad sign, but based on the flow numbers this suckers put out, I think it might be a good one! Speier Racing Heads, one of the companies involved with this heads development got the nod to finish them out and do a little tweaking to the CNC ports, they’ll be filled with Victory TI valves from Neil & Parks, and bumping those big valves WIDE open will be a new Big Ass Bullet Cam spec’d out by Sam Vincent at Vincent Performance. Based on the advice from my friend Alex Hays, we’re going to try the PSI 1280 springs, with Xcelydyne components from Vincent Performance. Our old Pro-Filer Sniper intake went under the knife also at Speier Racing Heads, it needed a bunch of work (these heads don’t work with any intake manifold out of the box), but the inside word is that Chad is the one that knows what, where and how to make this intake work with these heads.
The old Dart Race Series Block was at the end of it’s life span and will be retired to street or bracket race duties, anyone you know that needs a bad ass street car engine let me know! I have enough parts laying around here we can build it out as a 620 pump gas monster.
The new replacement block is an Aluminum Block from Brodix that we bought also through Vincent Performance. It’s a 10.2 Deck BBC, Half-Filled and totally “HIPed”, the weight savings on the block alone is gonna be massive compared to that really heavy (heavier than a Big M) cast iron Dart block. My life long buddy Mark Carney at Automotive Machine in Emporia, Kansas did all the prep work on it. As it arrived from Brodix, it needed the sleeves set, cylinders bored/honed, align honed and the 60mm cam bearings pressed in. He got us all fixed up with expert work as always.
I definately have to give these guys and companies a shout out in helping us get back out and racing again somewhat quickly – those that run engines like this know it can easily take a year or more to get all these pieces together as “everything” is custom, and we’re just about ready to go again here at the 4 month mark. That’s pretty good when dealing with something like this.
This new block will let us finally get the Nova down below minimum weight for X275, that alone will help a bit, and hopefully the new heads will make quite a bit more HP as well. Of course with the lighter front end, it will likely take a few passes to figure out what the car wants. Hopefully that won’t take too long cause we’re itching to get back out and get some good passes in.
Stay tuned for how this new beast performs…
