Almost 10 years ago, Carlos (the owner of the car) showed up to our house with a brand-new Camaro! After being playing around with small 4 cylinders late 90’s and early 2000 technology we get our hands on a whole new platform.
Then a Injen intake was added to the car.
We went to Salinas Speed to test the car, not knowing a lot about Drag racing just trying to have fun and learn. We were able to run a 14.6 @ 96-97 MPH on the 1/4 mile, obviously not the time that the car should run while trapping 96+ mph but we were just having fun.
On the dyno the old Dynocenter the car made 277! A little over the norm for those cars but we were happy with the results.
Later on Carlos decides to upgrade the rear end (differential) to a 3.91, that’s when he bought the HP Tuners to tune the car in order to fix the speedometer for the new rear end, we were 3 young guys without a clue on how that works, just had experience with Apex VAFC, megasquirt, Honda Crome and Mitsubishi Ecuflash. We started reading about it on how to properly tune a newer GM Platform with a computer that works completely different than the previous ones that we already knew.
I still remember the first day that we moved some parameters on the laptop using the HP Tuners and we went for a test drive that when Carlos did a power shifting to 2nd gear the car went a little sideways (before the tune the car had all kind of controls that avoid that) we were so’ excited about it! It was a whole new car.
Then Carlos took the car to Tittiao Motorsports for a custom exhaust. With a custom muffler setup along Vibrant resonators and a Cherry Bomb Glasspack Muffler. And some mild throttle porting job was done to it.
Later on, Carlos showed up with the idea about a nitrous kit, remember we are working on the V6 version of the Camaro.
Not a lot of options to improve power without doing an engine swap. We installed a NOS nitrous kit, and during the process came out with the idea of making a "box" that will allow us to change the tune on the fly without performing an ecu reflash every time that we decide to use the nitrous without installing extra devices to retard timing or add fuel to the tune.
Going a little deeper on that "box" for those interested on how stuff works, the logic behind it is a circuit that intercepts the air intake temperature sensor with a resistor that when the "nitrous system is on, it enables the box which have 2 stages one for the intake temperature sensor making the computer see a fixed temp were we can go to those air intake temperature timing compensations and retard the timing to were we need to take that 100+ shot and also the 2nd stage is to engage the NOS around 4,000rpm only when is at WOT ( wide open throttle), 100% tps, pedal to the metal!
We started spraying a 100 shot, on the dyno we get almost the 100 hp gain, for some reasons the number were lower, some differences are different spark plugs, different spark plug gap for the nitrous.
Then the clutch didn't hold. That's when the Spec Stage 4 clutch upgrade was installed. As right now we are spraying a 125 shot. As right now the car still being driven some days and Carlos is planning on work some more upgrades to the car.
