New Raptor..Ram killer

MTVR

Well-known member
We used to put smaller pulleys on our MINI Coopers to spin the screw faster.

Yup.

I have no idea where he's getting the idea that a larger blower pulley would increase boost/power.

In reality, there aren't a lot of gains to be made on the Hellkitten, without having to switch to race gas, which means that your gas now costs $20/gallon, you can only drive it as far as you can get on half a tank of fuel, in a car that gets crap fuel mileage, you have to pump the fuel out before letting the car sit so that the fuel doesn't damage fuel system components, and you may be replacing four expensive heated oxygen sensors regularly- it's just not practical...
 

Mike W.

Well-known member
Yup.

I have no idea where he's getting the idea that a larger blower pulley would increase boost/power.

In reality, there aren't a lot of gains to be made on the Hellkitten, without having to switch to race gas, which means that your gas now costs $20/gallon, you can only drive it as far as you can get on half a tank of fuel, in a car that gets crap fuel mileage, you have to pump the fuel out before letting the car sit so that the fuel doesn't damage fuel system components, and you may be replacing four expensive heated oxygen sensors regularly- it's just not practical...
So I called my buddy and asked what had been done to the car..your right it's a 2.5 pulley Kik. Injectors, air intake and exhaust system. 100 hp nitrous kit and it's run on 100 octane fuel..by the way can be purchased locally for $6.90 a gallon.

As you can probably figure it's not a daily driver. Last Dyno was 887 hp ..Best quarter mile is mid 9s..
 

Martinjmpr

Wiffleball Batter
I like how we are all lamenting about how under powered our 400+ HP production vehicles are these days.

In high school I remember being excited about the Z06 Corvette, which if I recall was something like 400 HP and a 0-60 of around 4 seconds.

Now our crossovers have NA V6s pushing 300 HP, and full size trucks all run 350-450 HP NA V8s or turbo sixes.

I know, right? :rolleyes:

I remember back in the 70's when I first got interested in 4x4s as a high school kid and reading some Four Wheeler magazine review of a Chevy with a 454 engine that produced something like .... 240 HP! Of course, that was in the days of carbureted engines choked with smog equipment but still, back then if a truck produced over 200 HP it was considered "high performance."

Nowadays you can get that much HP from a Subaru.

Obviously torque is what trucks really need and of course, in those days, you could still get a manual transmission in a truck (indeed, that's how most trucks came from the factory, the automatics were for the high-end "cowboy Cadillacs.")

Still it's kind of funny how a "mere" 300HP V6 is considered weak sauce these days when truck shopping. I never felt like the 22r in my old Toyota pickup was underpowered and it made, what, 98 hp on a good day?
 

MTVR

Well-known member
So I called my buddy and asked what had been done to the car..your right it's a 2.5 pulley Kik. Injectors, air intake and exhaust system. 100 hp nitrous kit and it's run on 100 octane fuel..by the way can be purchased locally for $6.90 a gallon.

As you can probably figure it's not a daily driver. Last Dyno was 887 hp ..Best quarter mile is mid 9s..

You may want to call him back- 887 horsepower is not enough to push 4,600 pounds to mid-9s. That's only enough horsepower to push that weight to a quarter-mile terminal velocity of about 134 mph. Even with an absolutely perfect chassis set-up, that's only enough mph for about a 10 flat ET.

Where is he racing at? You want to post the dyno print out, some time slips, maybe a picture of the car?
 
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MTVR

Well-known member
As an example of what mid-9s actually are, Sport Rider tested the BMW S1000RR back in the June of 2010, and it ran a 9.57 at 156.1 mph, stock, on pump gas...
 

MTVR

Well-known member
That's no exhaust note.
This is an exhaust note:


We were guests of Team Kalitta that day. The noise from that engine in the pit was excruciatingly delightful.

Did you talk math with them?

The stoichiometric ratio for nitromethane is about 1.7:1. That's why they back down the engine with a breaker bar before starting it- to avoid hydraulically locking up the engine.

I love racing math...
 

jmnielsen

Tinkerer
The Hellkitten's biggest challenge, is that no matter how much horsepower it makes, it still weighs over 4,500 pounds. It's never going to be able to keep up with something like the 3,500-pound 700-horsepower twin-turbo Porsche 911 GT2 RS "Widowmaker"...

Yeah but can you load yourself and 3 buddies in that Porsche and go out to do hoodrat stuff? Lol
 
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MTVR

Well-known member
The Widowmaker is so much faster than a Hellkitten, you'd probably need two cameras to record a race between them- they are not even close in terms of performance.

Heck, the 991 Widowmaker will even dump a stock Dodge Demon in the standing quarter mile...and go around corners...and brake...and get decent fuel mileage...and can be driven in the rain...and can be driven in cold weather...and the Widowmaker comes with twice as many seats.
 

MTVR

Well-known member
I just ran the numbers- with an absolutely perfect chassis set up, a 4,600 pound Hellkitten would need well over 1,000 horsepower to run a 9.50 quarter mile. With a less than perfect chassis set up, it would take even more horsepower to do that.
 

Mike W.

Well-known member
You may want to call him back- 887 horsepower is not enough to push 4,600 pounds to mid-9s. That's only enough horsepower to push that weight to a quarter-mile terminal velocity of about 142 mph. Even with an absolutely perfect chassis set-up, that's only enough mph for about a 10 flat ET.

Where is he racing at? You want to post the dyno print out, some time slips, maybe a picture of the car?
LOL...I talked with the owner and his response was a single digit salute..Keep guessing..
 

Mike W.

Well-known member
The Widowmaker is so much faster than a Hellkitten, you'd probably need two cameras to record a race between them- they are not even close in terms of performance.

Heck, the 991 Widowmaker will even dump a stock Dodge Demon in the standing quarter mile...and go around corners...and brake...and get decent fuel mileage...and can be driven in the rain...and can be driven in cold weather...and the Widowmaker comes with twice as many seats.
For an extra $100,000 that a good deal..
 

badm0t0rfinger

Raptor Apologist.
Kinda why I stopped modifying much under the hood a long time ago; just about everything sold anymore has totally adequate performance and if you really want to go faster it's generally cheaper to sell what you have and buy a faster vehicle than it is to try to shove more fast into the slow thing you have.

The tough part of all this is marketing adequacy. In Western language the word adequate carries negativity, even an air of poverty. A three out of five is failure. 2nd place is first loser. All you can eat is a dare.

I've tried to exercise the Scandinavian concept of lagom - you could google that word if you're not familiar or the summary is that enough is the right amount and more than enough is at minimum a waste. Eastern culture has a related concept of shibui which implies a balance of proportional strengths and limitations. These ideas don't sell well in America because over here a V6 Mustang is for teenage girls, GT86 needs a supercharger and the 46mm Bilsteins are for streets and parking lots you need $3500 Kings if you plan to go car camping overlanding a mile down an easy dirt road.

Since it's tough to sell shibui to Americans we get horsepower wars. I doubt we'll see many of these dynosaurs used for serious backcountry travel, just like AMG G-wagens they surely have the necessary hardware to cover substantial terrain but people don't buy them for that. You'll have a few folks with money buy them to go yee haw at the sand dunes but the people who have the funds to go beat up a truck that costs six digit money generally suffer a bit of A.D.D. from all the options money affords and wouldn't be suffering a quiet night under the stars if they could help it.

On the other side of that if you put the same development effort as a raptor/TRX/etc into fine tuning a vehicle to perform exceptionally well as a long term car camping overlanding daily driver you'd wind up with something that has like 200 horsepower and 29" tires with a whole bunch of "invisible" improvements like skidplates and recovery points and aux cooling/filtration on every lubricant and configurable interior parts.. the market would give you a combination of confused mooing and crickets chirping in return for your effort.

So we get what we deserve. A bunch of elevator music boring not-great-at-anything people mover CUV's that will get you to most developed campsites, the occasional exception like Wrangler and maybe the new Bronco, and big money showpieces whose tech development may help subsidize smaller incremental improvements in the more realistically priced vehicles we end up actually buying down here in the cheap seats.

This is a fantastic post. I realize that some of my own biases come into play; I do make the distinction between what I want and what I need. I feel as though a lot of people have been sold that what they want and what they need are always one in the same.
 

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