Remains a mystery. It has been installed for nearly three years now put a little over 4,000 miles on it. My best guess is that there are a combination of problems.
We had trouble with the snout breakaway a couple of years ago and they upgraded the system. So where the snout would have probably normally broken as it was designed to do, the force was transmitted to the rear bearings. Once the rotors touched, I was smurfed.
Discussions with Whipple indicate there is nothing noticeabley wrong with the cog drive, ie that wasn't the problem. However, the belt tended to hit the brace on the driver's side when cold,. I am thinking the extra drag that caused was a contributor.
Whipple has a 2000 hp marine internal setup that they have now applied to the system. I think we were operating far beyond the specs they had in mind, and we've been doing it for three years.
Previously we had fueling issues, using the wrong fuel filter on the inlet. The engine was starved for fuel which probably explains the low horespower ie 969 wheel horsepower. Changing the filters forced us to redo the entire tune. It will bee interesting to see if that affected the numbers.
Bear in mind, of the 4,000 miles, probably several hundred were on the dyno at WOT. You've seen my videos on the rest.
We have re machined the snout brace and Whipple has now upgraded the rotor pack and bearings. Everything in the blower is new except the case.
When I put the TH400 in we initially had a 4500 rpm stall. That sucker hit hard amd given the other issues may have contributed. We have gone back to a 3700 rpm stall now.
There are not a lot of people to share experiences with on 4.0 Liter Whipple mounted on LS engines. Since this wil apparently be the upgrade to the 2.9 on the COPO, perhaps there will be more learning in the future. I guess I am finding what breaks first.
Test Fitting the modified snout Mods to the snout included widening the idler pulley shaft base, cleaning up some damage to the mounting plate, and trimming off some material from the driver's side.
Okie the blower is back on. It has been completely rebuilt by Whipple. We added the CBM Motorsports Intake. Had to custom fab the throttle cable mount, still need some work there. I screwed up the an connector to the fuel regulator so we didn't get to start it up. Hopefully will start it this week.
Test Fitting in the Dakota 6 cylinder, it rides well
Pressing on the Gear
**** you have to do to use the CBM Intake on a street car
I am looking for a better window switch option than the OEM. I think I have found a couple of rocker switches that will work. I am going to move the fire pulls back to the rollbar then add a on off on switch with two LED's one for transbrake and one for lineloc. Plumcrazy turned me on to the setup. With the switch, the LED will indicate which one is active for the shifter button.
The black material is ABS. Once I get the panels and switches right I will replace them with actual carbon fiber like I have with the current switch. Would love to hear suggestions.
Taken about a week to figure out the throttle stuff. I turned the TB 90 degrees and made a bracket to run it in from the side. Took some monkeying around to get it where it would give me 100% but I think I am there.
Went from this
To this
Had to douche the return spring, still working on that one. So afterwards took her out for a spin. Not inspected so tried to keep it reasonable.
Did a short launch, nothing spectacular
Couple of short Romps
Ran into a C6 playing with a 335i. Just didn't want to hit it in the neighborhood. The 335i slowed down looked and waved. The vette seemed in a hurry to get away. Some day soon my friend.