A Class Act

We get to drive lots of modified cars. That's no surprise but this might be: most of them are pretty bad.

Like, no power down the bottom end then whammo! she's on for young and old. Like, cars with clutch take-up so sudden that you need the leg control of an ice skater to get away smoothly without first pulling five thousand rpm. Cars that ride so harshly you can feel your internal organs being bounced around, cars that take ten seconds of cranking before they'll even start. Cars with shrieking fuel pumps and wooden brakes, cars with.... Well, you get the picture.

But we can state that Mick Black's VX R8 Clubsport is a completely different beast. With just over 400hp at the rear treads it goes bloody hard, no doubt about it. Mick's tentative to proffer a hand-timed figure but he has clocked 4.5 seconds to 100 kays and that sounds about right. But this car also has an engine that idles like a stocker, can be pottered around at 40 klicks in fourth gear, has a great ride, starts first time every time, has a progressive build-up of torque that wouldn't trouble a learner driver, and gets fuel consumption better than a standard Clubsport. And it's fully legal...

Of course, getting the car to this stage took both a lot of time and money - and there were some false-starts along the way - but for a sheer usable but immensely hard-hitting outcome, you'll go a long way to find something better. A very l-o-n-g way in fact. To be honest, we're damn hardpushed to think of a car that we have driven that mixes driveability and performance as well as this Clubby.

The car runs Pacemaker 4 > 1 extractors and twin 2½ -inch twin exhausts with larger cats, but really making it all happen is an intercooled CAPA Vortech kit. The application of the kit was part of the learning experience...

"When we bought it and put it on," says Mick, "we were only getting five pounds - and it was supposed to be 7 psi boost. Bob Romano [of Bob Romano Performance Motors], who did the whole set-up, went back through the complete system but we couldn't find anything wrong. So we ordered a 28-tooth [supercharger] pulley and now that's got our boost up to 10 psi. The previous pulley was 32 teeth. In the mid-range we're now getting about 7 psi.

"So we got the kit fully in there and took it for a test drive, onto a nice piece of straight road. The mechanic was driving and it seemed to be going quite well - sitting in the passenger seat, I was very impressed. So I said, 'What do you reckon you could do 0-100 in now?'

"He gets the revs up and drops the clutch - and we went nowhere. And the smell coming through the car - it was unbelievable. The clutch was gone; well, not gone but she couldn't handle the power going through. So we put an 800hp clutch in it.

"Bob rang me and said, 'The car's ready to be picked up, we've just got to do a bit of a test-drive on it and put it on the dyno.' But then that afternoon he called again and said, 'Look I've got a real problem - Number 6 cylinder has dropped on it.' He said 'I just took it out for a test drive and I think that the piston's gone - it's put a hole through the piston or it's disintegrated, one or the other.'

"So we went with an engine rebuild. When they had it all pulled down they looked at [the piston] and thought that it could have been the fault of the supercharger, however, ever since new I always thought that the car was down on power, and I could always hear pinging coming out in the higher rev range.

"I spoke to HSV about the pinging but they just said, 'It's winter fuel and summer fuels'. This is the story I used to get from them - winter fuels and summer fuels. But I buy from a depot and I know that their fuel is absolutely perfect. It's always been run on premium - it never had just standard unleaded in it, never. So I don't think it was fuel.

"So Holden couldn't get [the pinging] out of it - that could have been the lead-up to the problem. The supercharger could have just been just the final blow.

"When we put the supercharger on I was getting detonation, but Chris Romano - who's fantastic on the engine management side - got it back on the dyno and said he couldn't hear any detonation.

"But then the problem with the cylinder happened. It was cheaper at that point to go with forged pistons, new H-beam rods, and a head-stud kit. They were oversized pistons so we got it down to the machining shop and had the bores re-honed. It's probably up slightly in capacity, but not much at all - and I believe it's still got standard compression. It was cheaper to put the good gear into it while the engine was apart.

"Compared to what it was from new - the standard Holden engine was a little bit rattly, a little bit pingy - it's as smooth as silk. It's absolutely beautiful - a completely different engine."

There haven't been any further engine problems.

"We put the Unichip back on it," Mick adds. "Chris seemed to think that it was a better way to go - he thought that he could re-program everything better with the Unichip. The power that we're making at the moment in horsepower is just over 400, which comes down to 305 kilowatts at the rear wheels.

"We've put LS1 engine covers on it, just to try to keep the heat down. It does generate a lot of heat - the next thing that I would like to do is get the extractors wrapped to keep the temperatures down a bit. These engine covers are actually warping a little with the heat.

"The diff and gearbox are standard - I think they'll handle it - but we've lowered the car two inches on Pedders Sportsrider springs. It makes the car handle much, much better."

The standard HSV dampers and sway bars are retained, but the original S02 Bridgestones have been swapped to same-size softer S03's.

"The grip I get out of this car is phenomenal. To really light these tyres up, you've got to be right into it. In the wet it's a different story...I always drive with traction control turned on in the wet, otherwise she'll just let go with a touch of the throttle. However, the traction control doesn't like it in the dry - it's very jerky, it doesn't seem to control it smoothly at all."

The inside edge of the rear tyres experience a lot of wear, something Mick found out when he discovered that the local HSV service outlet weren't following head office instructions. Apparently the directive is that the front tyres stay in place, and the rear tyres are swapped left rim to right rim - that is, the tyres are removed from the rims during the change. This evens out the wear across each of the rear tyres. However, the service agent was just rotating all the wheels in a conventional pattern, resulting in time in all four of the tyres becoming worn on the inside edges! Mick discovered this when he found the inner edge of one rear tyre worn to the metal - not a happy discovery when the car was being regularly serviced.

In total Mick's car is getting on for $100,000 - would he suggest that others follow the supercharged route?

"If you're going to do it, by all means do it - but have the money there for a full engine rebuild. Put the cost of a rebuild into your figures. The internal workings of this engine are not designed to handle what the supercharger is going to boost it up to - and that is obvious. If you're going to fit the supercharger kit, calculate into your figures around ten, eleven thousand dollars extra to rebuild the engine."

He pauses, then adds, "The thing is that when you do that you're going to have a much stronger engine, a much sweeter sounding engine, and you're not going to have any dramas with it."

It might have been a bumpy road but drive the blown Clubbie now and all you can do is revel in the excellence of the finished result.

Naturally Aspirated? Interestingly, the jump to the intercooled supercharger wasn't the first power-producing step that Mick tried with his car. "We originally did tri-Y extractors on it, with a slightly larger exhaust system with standard cats. We also took the rear resonator off. And we put a Unichip on it. "From the original power of 165kW at the rear wheels - which I thought was well down out of the factory - we got the power up to 189kW. But for a couple of thousand dollars I didn't think it was huge - I really wanted a bit more of a power gain. So that's when we decided to go with the Vortech supercharger."

Contact:

Bob Romano Performance Motors
+61 7 3395 8255

www.capa.com.au

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