OK, here's where we are so far....Right now Sean is working on at least three 700+hp turbo cars in his little shop. Pretty cool if you ask me. All three should run real good when done. You've seen the pictures of SS4Matt's car being worked on.
My car has put down just a tad over 700rwhp with 13degrees of total timing and 16lbs of boost. Torque is right at 600ftlbs... This is nearly what it did before with the pt76gts @ 21lbs of boost and 16degrees of timing.
So, we know that it is going to make more steam.
However, we are having a problem with the ignition. It is breaking up over 6000rpm's and we can see through the AEM box that the ignition is at its limit. As soon as we back the car down to about 13lbs of boost and its making about 650hp, the car will pull cleanly all the way to redline with no problem. Yes, it has fresh plugs gapped at .25 and the ignition stuff is almost brand new. Others have made these Ford ignitions go farther, I know. But for some reason, this is it for me.
So, we are switching it over to a GM "coil on plug" ignition. I thought about upgrading to the MSD digital 7, but that thing is really expensive and supposedly won't last on the street. I know guys do it, but I don't want to be replacing parts this summer again.
The AEM box that I have has the capability of running the GM coils. Plus, they now make a unit that goes in the place of the distributor (looks like a distributor without plug wires) that takes care of timing, so you don't have to run a crank trigger. I just bought a set of the really hot (as in spark-hot) GM truck coils. These coils will support enormous cylinder pressures and guys have made as much as 1900hp with them. Plus, they are designed to go 100k miles, so they ought to last.
What we plan to do is install the coils in the back of the engine bay on the lower part of the fire-wall, or down by the k-member out of sight. We will run the wires to the plugs from the back and bottom of the headers and plugs, which will work perfectly with the car being a turbo and the headers facing forward. This should be pretty cool. When you look at the front of the engine bay, you won't see any sparkplug wires at all... Should provide for some nice confusing looks at the local car shows
Once we get the change made, we'll fire it up again and let 'er fly and I'll let you know how it does.
Dan