G-body Roll Call

[SRD art]

Isn't 2012 the year the world ends?...

Not till late December, so we still have 12 months to play around and save for good fire insurance!! Lol!



Yeah, it's great to see more R&D for these cars. They're plentiful, still relatively cheap to buy, and prolly the best GM "muscle car" to build for the $ from the late 70s through mid 80s. Just a thought, compare the number of running G bodies to the number of still in use F bodies from the same era, seems we dominate that one...

[SRD art]

Hey Bulldawg Joe, I volunteer my wagon for test fits for the long back cars. ;)

[UNGN]

Lets see more of this car!!! Did your passenger roll the window up at speed or what?? lol

The windows blow out at about 140 and by 168 the gap is about 1.5". When we drop below 120 mph, they pop back into place. They actually have about 2" of inward preload on them. The great thing about them is you can tell approximaely how fast the car is going when someone takes a picture of it.

Here are some pictures of it without the stickers:



And some with:




The Stickers mainly cover "field modifications" where we had to bust out the sledge hammer to get more fender clearance, etc, so we'll leave them on until we redo the 14 year old paint.


Here is an old video of what it's like to ride along:

http://youtu.be/7GPY_vFIGnY

[SS PUNISHER]

Oooh weee! lol that looks like fun!

[WS6]

gorgeous 2+2. Welcome to the forum and thanks for posting those pictures. I miss my 86 GP even if it was just a slow 3.8 carbed engine

[vintageracer]

I owned several of the 86 2+2's and really like those cars. They are a little funky looking proportion wise but a very different from from all the other G body cars and best of all you hardly ever see a 2+2. If and when I do buy another G Body car that car will be another Pontiac 2+2 or one of the 200 1986 Aero-Coupe Monte Carlo's.

[UNGN]

Our 2+2 has worked out pretty good for us. There is no better feeling than having a bigmouthed Corvette guy in a C6 make excuses why he was 10 mph slower than a 25 year old, used car lot POS that you built yourself (with a little help from your friends).

The Aero speaks for itself. Here's me waving at the Radar guy at nearly 170 mph, on a truck worn 2 lane road with a 10 mph cross wind.





For Comparison, this is what a C5 Z06 looks like at about the same speed through the same trap in 2008:



Check out the distances between the top of the tire and the fender lip.

[Tony_SS]

I never liked those 2+2's..... until now! Thanks for the pics.

[SRD art]

170! That's incredible. Have you got a build thread on the web somewhere? I'd love to know what it took you to get there...

[UNGN]

170! That's incredible. Have you got a build thread on the web somewhere? I'd love to know what it took you to get there...

We are limited to 168 in ORR due to tire speed ratings, but it would probably top out close to 175 with the current gearing and if we optimized the gearing for top speed, probably would touch 180. At the last Big Bend, I was pedalling it to avoid exceeding 168. The motor is basically a stock ZZ502 with about 12,000 hard miles on it now. It can use some new valve springs, because I tend to wind it a little too much, but otherwise this is an excellent motor.

We don't have a build for it on the net, because we built it in 1997/1998 and have rebuilt it many times since then (it seems like everything but the motor), to fix parts that broke and try new things.

We've torn up more parts that companies advertise as "bulletproof" than I can count, including a 9" detroit Locker and 3 Richmond ROD 6 speeds. We switched over to a Magnum T-56 after the 2011 Big Bend, after shearing the mainshaft in the Richmond "just cruising along" in the 140 class. Up until that point we had gone 90 miles averaging right at 140 mph and drove the last 30 miles in 4th, on the rev limiter @ 125 mph, with 5th and 6th gear laying in the bottom of the trans case. The new T-56 worked pretty good at the 2011 Arnold SORC race and post race checklist of things to fix/impove is the shortest it has ever been.

We've developed a pretty good system to get close to the ORR perfect time that doesn't really involve too much thinking, calculating, stopwatches or precision driving skill and because we've learned that so much unpredictable stuff comes up, it's good to have backups for your backups.

Over the last 10 years, we've whittled our theoretical precision down from +/- 11 seconds (std GPS above a 100 mph average) to +/- 2 seconds (Garmin III GPS with .1 mph average over 100 mph) to "less than 1 second" by measuirng the course with an odometer that is accurate to .002 miles, then making sure the odometer tire (front left) tracks roughly along same path during the race and we account for tire growth with a correction factor that varies by average mph and temperature and check our odometer with known checkpoints along the course, Like mail boxes and highway signs.

We have 3 GPS speedos and one speedo on the Odo tire, because if we break tech by 1 mph, we are disqualified. 169 mph through ANY of the radar traps means you go home at the turn around, the long way, at 70 mph, not 140.

The way Open Road Races are nowadays, less than 1 second might only get you 7th place, so we aren't trying to win, we are just trying to get close enough that we can win if we get lucky.

The G-body is a great platform for open road racing, because ORR isn't about Ultimate handling. ORR is like "Bracket Road racing". You want a stable, predictable car you can put a lot of HP into. Because YOU decide how fast YOU want to go, you can pick a class that is right at the ability of your car and just have a great time beating the crap out of it.

[Norm Peterson]

Very nice, especially now that I know that all those GPS things are performance-related. I used to do a little TSD rallying, and these ORR classes sound somewhat similar in that you're trying to "zero" a 90 mile long leg at a high average speed. T'ain't easy.

No matter what the motorsport activity, it's fun being under-estimated.


Norm

[SRD art]

So what's your final drive ratio?

I'm not anywhere near what you've got into your car but I'll be putting a 9" into my wagon and I have a 2.75 center and a 3.50 center. I'll be running a +/- 400 flywheel hp LS motor and a th350. The car isn't built yet so I'm just wondering if it'll make it in the 130 or 140 MPH club at Bonneville...

[LS6 Tommy]

81 Malibu, disappeared at roll cage fabrication shop. Trying to locate the guy. Cars been gone since last summer. No reply from shop owner after many voice mail messages. nContacting Police next week

You must have great patience. I would have been at the shop with the poice the first day...

Tommy

[BulldawgMusclecars]

Hey Bulldawg Joe, I volunteer my wagon for test fits for the long back cars. ;)

There will be some wagon specific stuff, so I will let you know!

[KacyZ28]

^^ X2 on the well said.
Some aftermarket parts I would like to see are:
- aluminum cowl hood(s) 2", 4"
- deep front inner fender tubs for big tires
- rack & pinion kit
- trunk/seat reinforcement bars
- replacement dash cluster pod, that can fit some gauges AND keep the A/C
- rear frame bolt-in crossmembers
- interior door panels / rear seat panels
- billet hood / trunk hinges
- electric window motor/harness upgrade kits

Just a start for the list, and we got tired of looking for a gauge set up with ac so we made one...it's kinda ruff right now but we'll get it cleaned up

[nowukno]

There will be some wagon specific stuff, so I will let you know!

Oh yeah,Im liking this!!!!

[UNGN]

So what's your final drive ratio?

I'm not anywhere near what you've got into your car but I'll be putting a 9" into my wagon and I have a 2.75 center and a 3.50 center. I'll be running a +/- 400 flywheel hp LS motor and a th350. The car isn't built yet so I'm just wondering if it'll make it in the 130 or 140 MPH club at Bonneville...

We currently run a 3.25 with a T-56 and run most races in .75:1 5th. We have run 3.0:1, 2.75:1 and 2.5:1 to try out different gear ratios with our Richmond ROD (1:1 5th, weak nut, made of glass .82 6th).

2.75:1 is a good ratio for ORR. If you want to Wind the LS out, you can get a 3.0 or 3.25, but I personally would not go with a 3.50:1.

2.50:1 is my personal favorite gear for a 1:1 final drive ratio (or for cars with a non close ratio or weak OD). Its very sluggish out of the hole and hard on clutches, but is Excellent above 130 mph. In the 140 mph class we run at big bend, the ability to accellerate from 130 to 160 is more important than accellerating from 0 - 60, since we only have to do that twice per race and have to accellerate above 140 coming out of almost every corner (I think there is about 100 of them in the race).

[howehot]

Schwartz Performance is preparing to build a G-Machine chassis for your g-body. I delivered my 84 Monte SS on Sept. 2 for chassis #1. Check there website and facebook page for details. www.schwartzperformance.com.
Some details: 13" rotors, 6 piston calipers, ridetech coil over adjustable shocks, splined sway bars, triangulated 4 lik rear susp, 9" rear 31 spline axles.

[Norm Peterson]

Welcome aboard.

The Schwartz 4-link is interesting in that it is really an upside-down Satchell link. I think that means you're getting a better rear roll center height than OE and better lower arm geometry for a high-HP/torque car than an original Satchell.

Will there be a build thread in "Project Updates"?


Norm

[howehot]

I believe they will use facebook and their website. Hopefully the build will start in a few weeks. They have a few projects to finish and parts to order for the Monte.