Muscle Cars – Building Horse Power the Right Way
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Once you have built that big bad engine for your muscle car, you’ll need to be 100% sure that a few other things match the engine that you just built, this is another one of those times when you need to think about what it is you want the car to do, is it a daily driver, or a race car / show car.
What you use the car to do will change the set up of things like the rear end, suspension, and transmission immensely, you can divide the two things evenly, but it usually doesn’t work very well to put a race engine on the street as your daily driver.
To get lower ET’s at the drag strip the racers are usually running a low rear end gear, or ring and pinion set to lower their time when they run the ¼ mile, and the lower the rear gear, the harder it becomes to drive the car on the street every day.
Most of the real racers are running a gear set that has a 4.30:1 ratio or a a lot lower, while most street cars don’t run a gear lower then 3.73:1, as a matter of fact it’s more common to see even higher gears then that on the street, like 2.90:1.
Obviously the lower the gear in the rear end of your car, the harder it will be to take your car on the freeway around your city, the engine will rap out at a lower rpm, but this is ideal for a race car, when you build your engine, get the company that you buy your cam from to recommend the right gear set. (more…)




