I think you might have misunderstood what I was saying. A lighter flywheel is not necessarily better. It may be (and often is) worse for anything other than pure track driving. In fact, even on a track car too light a flywheel can be a problem.

Would you guys say the upgrades are necessary if your not drag racing or doing track days?

It has nothing to do with racing , although to be legal in many events I believe SFI rating is required.
It has to do with horsepower, rpm, driving and your safety. With a high hp motor on the street parts can still break.
What happens if you get on the throttle on your favorite back road, miss a shift and over rev your intended RPM?
Or you decide on a whim to show some kid how fast your "old" car really is to the next stop light? (not suggested)
The reality is that these cars get driven. And if driven hard, even not very often things can go wrong.
To me it comes down to chance. I want to be safe, along with anyone else in or around my car. Why take the risk and skimp on safety?

Clutches explode ALL the time at the drag strip. Even an automatic should have a scatter shield. This is a requirement in a lot of racing classes. I used to run a transmission blanket, the fact that it absorbs the impact damage over a longer period of time, and thus lowers the force at any point in time was the deciding factor for me.

My car is a family convertible cruiser that will never see the track. I was just curious if its necessary to upgrade.

Thanks

If you are using parts in excess of what they were engineered for, then I think the answer is yes. For example, exceeding factory hp ratings while using stock components.

Billet means it is machined from raw stock as delivered from the mill. The part is machined from this chunk of metal into the part. Alternatively, a part is cast into the design and then finished machined into tolerance. It's the process not the material really. So you can have billet steel or billet aluminum.

As for aluminum or not flywheels I can only speak from experience with my car. I put an aluminum flywheel in my formula. It revved more easily and would respond well after already moving. From a stop, the cast steel flywheel hit harder and would get the car up and moving more quickly. The cast flywheel had more inertia to transfer to the rear wheels and get the car moving from a stop. I didn't regret putting the Fidanza flywheel in the car even though I would randomly stall out at a stop light after many thousands of miles of driving the car. However, if I were to do it again, I'd go billet steel. Lighter than cast, heavier than aluminum, and stronger than both.

i have an alu flywheel in my Nova with a Dual Disk clutch, i like it, makes it rev alot faster, but if i was drag racing i would be using a steel one to keep the inertia up

what is it you don't like about them for a street car.

can you imagine what that Chevelle would have looked like if it had an aluminum bell housing??????:wow:

Effective loss of torque, too little benefit for the cost, reduced strength (debatable).

Bottom line, on the street and the track, every time I or a friend has used a lightweight flywheel, there has been no real measured improvement at the cost of some amount of drivability. At the 1/4 mile, typically have found them to even sometimes slow the car down. It all depends, but why bother for a street car?