308 with extra HP!!!

I would be afraid to have 400+ HP in my 328 due to the brakes. I have a lead foot and I think I'd get myself in trouble and run out of braking area.

I used to think the brakes on the 328 were pretty decent and were much better than my two modern daily drivers. Then I took my car to the track and also rode with my friend in his Ford GT on the same track. He has WAY more brake than I do. That's when I realized just how much better big brakes can be.

 

As you noted, the difference is in the planned use of the car. The brakes on my 328 are excellent for road use and I see no way to improve them that would actually improve their performance on the road. But I have no doubt that with the intensive brake use that a track would demand when pushing the car fairly hard, they would be lacking.

On the road in any circumstance I have managed to get the car into, including two panic stops at 140MPH out in the wilds of the AZ desert (for my own amusement, NOT because I HAD to stop), the brakes stopped the car impressively and with the ABS actively jittering to moderate wheel locking. As noted by someone else, if the brakes will lock the wheels, better brakes won't "lock them more." But they will resist fading which is the issue on the track.

 

fantastic looking race car...any more pics or the racing barker car? i hope thats not the one that burnt down recently?

anyhow lots of talk about how much hp the transaxle can take. wouldnt a better measure be how much torque load a gearbox can take? all things being equal its the torque that tears em apart

as for the LeMans and gr4 micholotto cars drivetrians. dont they run with straight cut gears?

doing away with the syncros a dogbox can shift faster and handle a lot more power due to stronger gears. SGears lack of end thrust that wants to split apart the tranaxle casing. this why race cars do away standard street type helical gears on pure race cars.

straight cut gearboxes sounds like a win, win deal but the last thing i would want to run on the streets is crash box on the streets due to the noise and clunkiness.

believe me there are ways to improve the stock brakes...whether its worth the hassle or be aesthetically period correct is another matter.

my 2cents

hf

 

Another approach would be to shed the weight. After everything is said and done, it's the HP to Weight ratio that is important. Does anyone have some figures on how much the various components weigh, such as engine lid, AC system, glass, front lid, bumpers, exhaust, door panels, etc. They all are replacable with light weight alternatives that will improve the ratio. Plus reduce the stress on remaining components. FWTW.

 

Weight reduction is great for a race car but for a street car all that sort of stuff means making the car less suitable for actually driving. I doubt you could get more than 100 lbs out of the car without removing items that would be "essential" for normal, reasonably comfortable operation. In my street racing days I never operated with more than 1/4 tank of gas in the car. On a 328 there's nearly 70 lbs right there! I mean, what are you really going to do to a 3x8 that will drop the weight by enough to really produce a major difference? If you could get a 3x8 down to 2500 lbs - which I'd say is essentially impossible - you still have a 13 sec car. It would be far cheaper and easier to add 60 HP and do the same thing.

If you only drive the car occasionally and can deal with the issues that light weight produces, it's fine but IMHO it's all too annoying. For pure performance buy a Z06 and have performance that will leave your 3x8 for dead no matter WHAT you do to the x8 and still have all the normal comforts!

 

I dont recall the weights of the heavier 78 and up cars, but IIRC my 77 GTB weighed about 2750 pounds when it came off the truck in 1977. Now replace the 100 pound bumpers with lighter glass ones, and lose the 130 pound muffler for a lightweight Ansa. That right there probably saves about 175 pounds. The AC system might lose another 75 pounds. Then leave the tool kit, jack and spare tire home... But, its amazing what the door panels weigh, they are pretty heavy for just a glass panel and leather skin. Plus there is that 20 pounds of insulation blocking the intake snorkel in the airbox. Might not get it down to 2500, but it should be close. Its also amazing how heavy the engine and gearbox is. Even apart and in boxes it makes you ask why it all has to be so heavy. I don't know what it all weighs together, but 700 pounds complete with headers and accessories wouldn't surprise me.

 

id say replacing/removing the usa 5mph bumpers/bracket/shock, stock cats/exhuast, spare tire, and battery should net you an easy 100lbs with out gutting the AC or interior keeping stock body work and glass. essentially bring to euro spec which maybe 100lbs lighter.

other heavy items include, door beams, sound deadening and seats with one piece race types.

gr4 michellottos where reputedly 910kg or 2250lbs or so... with full cage, rally lights and timing equipment. not really a street car but not a pure gutted road racer either.

i saw a fully street 308gts at blackhorse endowed with the magical 355 drivetrain weighing in around 2650-2750 if memory servers? the must be some ride...

 

There have been reports on here of 308s running wide sticky tires, breaking the halfshafts. Be careful with super wide tires.

I also wonder how the stock hub/spindle back there is going to handle so much wheel/tire. I guess proper offset would keep the stress centered, but the halfshafts are not going to like all that stick, especially if 500hp are being sent to them!

My .02

Greg

 

Well said. Actually, its amazing what is now required to have a "comfortable" car. My 308, with all the stuff removed, is still more comfortable than my old MGTC, XK150 Jag or Alfa Spyder. Probably a function of age - my age, that is.

And yes, for pure performance (and comfort) the Z06 is the answer - I just picked one up last month. For years I debated whether or not to boost the 308. The Z06 just made more sense. I talked to too many racers who pushed the 308 hp envelope and ended up breaking parts. You can't win a race if you can't finish.

 

That is really fascinating, Dave. I think its great when enthusiasts take the time to try things people never imagine.

Could you take a look at the block and determine if it would be possible to machine/alter it, and/or make some adapter to attach the motor to the 308 gearbox?

 

I don't know about you guys, but I would take a carb 308 with 270-280bhp over a stock boxer (boxer weighs 3600lbs and has 340bhp ish) any day. Performance is the same but you have a huge advantage of driving a car that is.....well...easier to drive than a boxer.

 

There's a vast difference between a) simply flooring it with the car already in motion, and b) dumping the clutch at rest with 6,000 rpm. b) creates a shock load to the drive train components that no stock transaxle is designed to take over and over again, even with the stock hp/tq. In contrast, a) is sustainable over the long haul in most cases.

So, yes, you can use all 400 hp/tq, just not over and over again with drop clutch burn outs. It's called having some "mechanical sympathy" for what you're driving. Any successful race car driver has a keen sense for the difference here as it means finishing the race, or not. Again, style matters.

 

The 308 gearbox is not the weakest link, the engine is. Norwood told me they felt the gearbox could handle 800 plus and I believe them, but no one has pushed a 308 motor that high. If there is any weak link its the input shaft. But Norwood said the 308 input shaft is stronger than a TR/Boxer box. When they boost the 12's above 700 HP the input shaft becomes a fuse of sorts and no harm comes to the box if it shears. Told me as long as you rolled the power on it could take nearly 900 HP. The problems start when owners who didn't like buying $1100 input shafts installed reinforced ones. Then it was like a $15K fix. Mark has studied this as well, which is why he feels confident his 800 HP V-12 wont blow the box to bits.

Ferrari is not Toyota or Ford who only build gearboxes to handle a bit more than the engines max power output. The gearbox is WAY overbuilt, and heavy. I swear the 308 gearbox weighs as much as the engine. Its not a toy.

 

The beauty of all that torque is reving to 6K and drumping the clutch is a complete waste of time as it only results in uncontroled wheel spin, at least with tires that fit under the stock fenders. I had to launch in 2nd gear at about 2500 and be ready to feather the throttle....1st gear was pretty uncontrolable for anything thing beyond idling through parking lots, I pretty much stopped using it.

 

Well, as I said earlier, Being ABLE to do a dragstrip start and choosing to do them regularly is two different things. IMHO, an engine/drivetrain that cannot accept such a start on occasion without fear of breakage (or actual breakage) is of no interest to me.

I am NOT saying that I want to turn the car into a drag racer, just that I don't want it to break if I choose to contest the issue occasionally. I just read several road tests of the 328, published when it came out in '86. After multiple runs to get a feel for it, one tester commentated on how well it launched at the drag strip by revving to 4500 RPM and dumping the clutch. He pointed out that the car "hazed" the tires as it got grip which is a term we used to use a lot, indicating the tires were "slipping" rather than spinning (up in smoke) which kept the RPM up while providing an excellent launch. The car ran a 14.2 and 99MPH which, incidentally, indicates flywheel HP of 261 by calculation - essentially the oem Ferrari specs. This leads me to believe that the claims that Ferrari overstated or exaggerated their HP claims is not true - well, at least in the case of the 328.

Interestingly, the testers in all of the tests (4 different tests) commented very favorably on the power of the car and especially the engine's ability to putter along at 1000 RPM in 4th gear. I noted that when I drove my 328 from Vegas to MD. I was most impressed with the amount of smooth power available at low RPM and the lack of the "coming on the cam" feel. They loved the engine but did NOT comment favorably on the handling, especially on less than smooth roads, or on the brakes which they noted, "needed ABS." THey said the car was a joy at 8/10ths but a handful at 9 or 10 and badly in need of an upgraded chassis (since it was an early 70's design).

Sorry for digressing a bit but I found the articles interesting - they were in a friends copy of a book that was only about the 328, 348, and Testarossa but I don't recall the name of it.

 

A stock QV launches nicely with a clutch dump from at about 5000-5500 rpm A QV with 400ft-lb of torque launches nicely with with very slight clutch slip form 2500, the tires just can handle anything more aggressive.

A set of modern high quality shocks and stiffer springs completely transform the handling...the stock setup just plain sucks, there is no other way to put it. As for as "needs" antilock brakes.....I find that a bizare comment honestly, you might convince me that teenagers and old ladies need antilock, everyone else learns to threshold brake which stops the car faster than any abs system out their.

 

re ABS...I don't agree

It's worth noting that F1 banned ABS in the 90's as one of the devices that "reduced the level of needed driver skill." Nigel Mansell, who won the championship in a Williams FW 15, with traction control, ABS, etc, said the FW15 was "So easy to drive a monkey could do it [win the championship]." F1 banned all that stuff the following year.

Essentially, ABS provides the threshold braking for you. Whether we like the idea that an electro-mechanical system can do something mindlessly that we have to practice hard to master is annoying but it's the way things go! Heck, stuff I used to be an "expert" at and was hard to do can now be done by any kid with a computer with no experience at all!

HOWEVER, I don't think ABS is better in every situation.

In my experience ABS is clearly NOT as good as conventional brakes in my experience is in snow/ice or dirt/gravel. In these conditions, and with regular performance tires, conventional brakes will lock and begin pushing gravel/whatever up in front of the tires which will help slow the car; ABS will just never allow this to happen and stopping distances can be insanely long. I believe I could drag my foot out of the side of the car and stop sooner than ABS in those conditions. (This was based on the performance of the ABS in my 1999 Porsche 911 - perhaps there has been some work on that aspect of ABS by now.

 

This argument could go on forever.

A 308 with 550 hp is very hard to drive on cold or wet roads, and requires a lot of caution in low gears in any conditions ….I think traction control becomes a must have on high hp street cars and on high hp race cars its really nice and improves results. This is the first system most racers add to their cars given the chance.

You can’t make the same case for ABS because the mechanics of it are a lot different. Traction control is looking at slip and trying to control it to a specified range, not to 0 which makes all the difference. Say 15% slip is optimal fo acceleration, the system does nothing below 15% and the action becomes increasingly aggressive as you exceed 15% this allows a very stable and smooth control system that can keep you with 1-2% of optimal at all times and is basically impossible for a human to beat. ABS is a whole other animal control system wise as you basically apply full braking power, lock the wheel, release the wheel, full power again and do it as fast as you can…so the brakes are not always braking and there are very real physical limits to how fast you can defect a lock and correct for it….it’s a violent system and a skilled driver will outperform it every time, or at least in every test I’ve ever seen.

ABS is for old ladies, TC is for racers

 

These kinds of engine testing tid bits are why I love reading your posts. I'd love to pick your brain one of these days on your "seat of the pants" dyno knowledge...or have you point to a book on such techniques. Interesting stuff.

 

"ABS is for old ladies, TC is for racers "

mk e - I totally agree; in the boating world real men use a chart and a compass, not GPS!

Futureman - Thanks, I appreciate the comment. As I've said before many times, I have NO experience whatsoever with Ferraris. I also have very little experience with forced induction - I've owned turbo cars but I've never done any performance engine work installing/evaluating forced induction, hence my many questions re SC for these cars. Didn't do any Nitrous work either though I worked with genuine experts at it - some of them split off to form Zex.

The vast majority of my engine work was done with subsequent dyno and 1/4 mile track testing. I don't trust any "seat of the pants" (SOP) evaluation, including my own, because my actual track/dyno work indicated that SOP was, at best, unreliable and most often just plain wrong. As far as adding power, UNLESS you are racing, adding less than 10% more HP to a 3000-3200 lb car is not worth the bother except for bragging rights. It just doesn't make a practical difference, despite what some seller of "performance" parts will claim.

THE classic case re SOP is changing the intake system to provide "better breathing" Usually this takes the form of more carburetion but can be porting, larger valves, etc. SOP says, "Wow! You can really feel the thing kick in, it's much faster." Track/dyno test says..."OOPS we lost a bunch of the midrange and the car is slower than it was before." "Performance" exhaust systems are just as bad due to the "loud factor."

There are a lot of ways to measure performance without a dyno or a track. I've mentioned this before but the "time from x RPM to y RPM" works quite well. If you check the stopwatch time (need a passenger to do the actual timing) it takes for a car to accelerate at WOT from say 3000 to 6500 RPM and do the same thing after a mod (same road and car weight), the difference will tell you if anything useful (or unuseful) happened. Yes, temp and humidity changes will make a difference so if they are considerably different, the test is not as useful.

There are a lot of publications around by people who really know this stuff, NOT people on the internet swapping lies - not that that would ever happen here! Although I don't do it professionally any more, I do work for friends occasionally. I don't trust anything I read on the internet re performance unless I know the person either personally, by reputation or the person's stuff in related areas to what I know agrees with my experience. For example if someone says, "I installed Cherry Bomb mufflers and they added 15 HP," I would ignore anything else that person said because my dyno experience showed that they REDUCED power compared to any oem performance car muffler that was in good condition.

Frankly, some of the best information is from the factory. Mopar, for example, had such a complete and definitive performance program, with books as thick as a big-gity phonebook. You could literally just apply their recommendations on everything from the engine to the suspension and you couldn't really do any better. One would think Ferrari could have done that, especially with their vast racing experience but I guess they were never interested in passing their knowledge on to the owners of their cars. Of course, that makes some sense since Enzo never made any secret of the fact that his street cars were just a cash cow for the racing program and he had little personal interest in them.

 

This is what I meant by "seat of the pants". In other words, on the road and not on a dyno. I guess I misused the term.