- With in excess of 1000 wheel horsepower and a best ever trap speed in a half mile
race event of 199 mile an hour, Aaron's EG Civic is obviously no slouch.
However there's a few things that make it a little unusual compared to your
typical Civic.
The obvious one there, when we look in the engine bay Aaron,
there's no B series engine in there.
Can you tell us about the J series engine swap you've done.
- This particular car has a J series V6 which started Honda in 1997.
This one is an '03 block I believe, it's a 3.5 litre.
And then I used the cylinder heads from the, in the U.S. the Acura TL,
that had the bigger valves and bigger ports.
- Now it's pretty well shown that the B series engine is easily capable
of supporting 1000 wheel horsepower well in excess.
We also know that there's no replacement for displacement.
So what exactly was the driving force behind going to the J series swap?
- After seeing how well our GT-Rs did at making power and staying together,
I thought about it and know that 1000 horsepower four cylinder,
really has passes in it, it doesn't have miles.
So my feeling was that if I did a V6, made the same power,
spread it out over more cylinders, hopefully I would have more reliability.
- I think that's an aspect that is so easy to overlook with all of the information
we see on the internet with forums, videos et cetera,
it looks, from the outside like it's incredibly easy to make
1100, 1200, 1300, even 1500 horsepower from a small capacity
four cylinder engine and that gives us the idea that it's also going to be
reliable but as you say, it just simply isn't the case.
And I think it's lost on a lot of people.
Once you're north of 1000 wheel horsepower, there are gonna be
some reliability problems there.
Now another issue with the EG chassis, particularly when you're making
big power of course, is the drive train.
What have you done there to make the drive train hold together?
- This car uses the transmission from a TL six speed as well.
So it has a factory limited slip tranmission.
Akin to like an Integra Type R.
I have stock first, second and third gears but I do have straight cut fourth gear
from MFactory, stock fifth gear, and then we deleted sixth gear
and used a cuff to hold the input and output shafts together.
- So in most instances at these sort of power levels we'd see people
reaching for a full aftermarket transmission or at least a dog
engagement gear set, but you've found that this combination is holding
together reliably?
- As far as power levels yes.
Making 700 plus foot pounds of torque, I haven't broke anything other than
fourth gear which is why I replaced it.
The problem with the J series is it's not well supported as of yet.
There's no dog box option.
So it's making do with what I have basically.
- Now it's all well and good swapping to a larger capacity engine,
you've gone to 3.5 litres, obviously that brings down the sort
of specific power level or power per cylinder when you're at that 1000
plus wheel horsepower mark.
But still there's not a lot of factory naturally aspirated engines
that are going to support that.
What have you done inside that engine to make it reliable?
- Surprisingly little.
I have Wiseco pistons, Pauter X beam connecting rods,
but it's still a stock sleeve, stock crankshaft.
I use factory Honda head gaskets.
Recently we did add camshafts, Crower has a camshaft option,
where it's a reground stock one, again not too much support but enough
to at least get me something.
So we supplied that, I've tried a couple of different intake manifolds,
and ended up modifying a stock intake manifold for the most reliability
as far as that goes.
- Now obviously in terms of getting the power out of the engine,
it's really all about getting boost into the engine.
So what's the turbocharger that you've fitted?
- Last year I used a Precision 7285, I've been very pleased with how
the Precision turbo's worked.
This year we have the Precision 8385, so I stepped it up quite a lot.
I do use a divided T4 turbine housing with a 128 AR.
- So is that to take sort of advantage of the fact you've got a V6 engine
and you're running one bank into each of the sides of the housing?
- Correct so I actually am able to use a twin scroll effect because
of the firing order which helps response time between shifts.
Not having that dog box, any amount of time that I'm wasting shifting,
I'm losing boost.
- Now I'll just actually touch on that because that was what was going through
my mind with the synchro mesh box, you actually are forced to use the clutch
to shift so when you've got a large turbo on an engine,
even with 3.5 litres capacity, it's likely to drop off boost,
so you get a lot of lag coming back into that next gear which was where
the dog box with flat shifting is an advantage.
OK so what boost levels are you running to make that sort of power?
- We ran it up to 41 pounds.
We did have some issues at 41 pounds but it wasn't the engine at that time,
it was the inlet manifold.
37 pounds the fuel flow was approximately 1140 horsepower.
Comparing to our other race cars where I have to add it to go look at.
- Now putting all of that power through just the front wheels could potentially
be a bit challenging so what strategies are you using at a half mile race event
in order to retain traction?
- Like most race cars, I start with good tyres.
So I'm using in this case some slicks, Mickey Thompson pro bracket radial slick.
Finding the correct air pressure was very essential.
The correct suspension, having the dampers set properly.
But then moving to the electronic side, I'm employing traction control,
loose per gear, we've tried using drive by wire as part of the traction
control strategy also.
I had other issues with that so we had to go back to the cable.
But between limiting the amount of torque per gear,
having a fairly well set up chassis, and then the traction control
to kind of clean up anything I might have missed,
it's really worked pretty well.
- So the idea there is you're not really relying on that traction control solely.
You're really trying to tune the power delivery of the car to suit the track
as you go down the track and then you're relying that traction control's just there
in the background as sort of a safety measure just incase you do break
into wheel spin?
- Correct so I always think in terms of torque.
First gear I can only put down maybe 400 foot pounds of torque
with the current set up.
Second gear I can get 500 maybe 510, third gear I can get it closer
to 600 foot pounds.
By the time I get to fourth or fifth gear, I'm putting down everything that the motor
can make so 700 plus.
With nitrous I'm assuming over 800 foot pounds.
- You just mentioned that nitrous, so we'll touch on that.
How are you using the nitrous, is that spraying the whole way down,
or are you using it for anti lag?
- I'm using it to help respool the turbo yes.
What we found on the last setup without the nitrous is that my
response time from seven psi to 34 psi was 3/4 of a second almost.
Using just 100 horsepower worth of nitrous,
I got that down to 0.28 seconds.
So a substantial increase.
- Particularly when you're potentially in excess of 150 mile an hour,
that 3/4 of a second that it takes to get back on boost,
you'r covering a lot of distance, so again that sort of comes back
to the fact you can't run a dog box with flat shift yes?
- Correct, and then it kind of gives me the option of if I feel that I've
ever ran out of turbo, I can just use the nitrous all the way
through the gear also.
- Now the electronics which you've touched on there,
you've talked about the traction control, nitrous control,
drive by wire et cetera, what is the ECU you're using?
- In this particular car I'm using an AM Infinity.
It's the seven series, the 708 specifically.
I also have the CD7 dash and the VDM so that I have acceleration data,
I have everything in front of me where I can see exactly what
the engine's doing which for the most part is usually just in the pits.
But the shift light function and all of that while I'm actually on the track.
- So when you're on the track as you've just said,
the shift light really that's the only thing you're focusing on
unless something goes wrong, but could you talk us through
some of the sensors that you use, or look at the data from at least
when you get back to the pits, to give you an idea of the health
of the engine and then let you know what direction to take
in order to improve how the car's performing.
- I use a lot of common sensors, I use knock sensors.
This particular motor I have outfitted with two Bosch flat response
knock sensors.
I have exhaust manifold pressure sensors, EMAP or EBP some people will call it,
to see if the turbo is out of housing where I'm at relative to boost.
I'm always watching the lambda.
For our particular form of racing I do have to run a little bit richer
to keep the motor happy by and large.
So instead of running a gasoline equivalent of like a 12:1
air fuel ratio, I'm running 11.1 to help keep the EGT down.
- Just touching on that, you're running on a ethanol based fuel?
- Correct I'm using Ignite 114, which is ethanol based,
and then refined from there.
But it's not something that's just mixed and put at the pump.
- And just for those out there who are gonna jump on that,
you've just quoted 11.1 as an air fuel ratio and you did say equivalent
on the gasoline air fuel ratio scale, I know we get a lot of people
confused about the different stoichiometric air fuel ratio,
so I'll just put that out there just before we get had up about it.
OK so in terms of those knock sensors, generally when we're getting
to the 1000 plus wheel horsepower mark in a relatively small engine,
generally if we encounter much in the way of detonation,
that's gonna end up damaging the engine quite quickly.
Are you relying on those knock sensors for knock control or is it just data
that you can look at?
- I do use it mostly for just the data, the AM does allow you to establish
a knock floor where if you feel that that's a safe level,
because you're not seeing random spikes occur,
that that's safe for that motor.
That takes a lot of experience, some trial by error.
Usually using a low octane fuel to actually instigate some knock
so you can see what that background level is.
But like you said, because of what we're doing, the RPM involved,
the boost pressures, mostly it's for reference on this particular motor.
- Alright look Aaron we know that despite what we've just talked about,
you actually have already suffered this weekend with some unknown
mechanical problem.
And of course this is the world we live in, this is the sport that we love,
and when you're pushing boundaries, things do inevitably get damaged.
So you've run 189 mile an hour already today, there's not gonna be any more
runs from you, but it's certainly an impressive car,
we look forward to seeing you get it back together,
find out whatever was wrong, fix it, come back stronger,
and we look forward to seeing you break that 200 mile an hour mark
in the not too distant future.
Thanks for the time to chat there Aaron.
- Thank you.
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