Brian’s Trans Am

Jake — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:45:41 +0000

A good buddy of mine has probably one of the cleanest F-Body’s I’ve ever seen. This car never stays dirty for longer than a few days, and is meticulously maintained all the time. When Brian got the car it had two previous owners which seemed to have taken very good care of the car. It had longtube headers, SLP air lid, and a cat-back exhaust setup when it got into his hands. Having the right mindset Brian started doing all of the suspension mods he could do to start out with. LCA’s, trailing arms, panhard bar, poly bushings, torque arm, Koni shocks, and a good set of Nitto 555R’s keep this bird planted to the ground. Before I drove Brian’s car the first time I had ridden in and driven several F-Body’s which all were relatively stock from a suspension point of view. All of them were okay to drive, but when you try to go WOT from a dig the cars were all over the place and had some bad body roll. Brian’s car was much different the first time I launched it. Doing a little tuning on it before the cam swap I took it over to SH35 and launched it pretty good from a dig. The car squatted down pretty good but kept straight and felt like a bullet compared to the other F-Bodies I had driven. I was pretty impressed and knowing that we were going to do a cam swap soon I was pretty damn excited to see how well it would drive with the cam.

Well, finally we had a date set for the cam swap. After some scheduling we finally were able to get it done at Brian’s buddy Frank’s shop over here in Friendswood. The cam swap consisted of a Comp Custom Grind 229/236 .59x”/.60x” 110+2, Comp Magnum 7.400″ pushrods, and Comp 921 Dual Springs with Ti retainers. Everything went as planned and thanks to TooTall for letting us borrow his spring tool and crank pulley installer we got the job done with ease. Although it took a while because it’s a F-Body it went pretty smooth. Here’s Brian working on getting the rear spark plug out on the passenger side…

After the cam swap was finally done we got to hear it start up for the first time. Unfortunately I don’t have a 3GS iPhone otherwise I would have some good video on here. It sounds pretty damn mean especially since he’s got the SLP LM1 exhaust on there now. The next day I commenced tuning the beast and it wasn’t all that bad. The cam idles rather easy considering the split and overlap, but don’t get me wrong it’s choppier than hell. It’s a unique sound for sure. The most important thing is that Brian is happy with the way everything turned out.

The only areas that are a bit difficult to tune this cam were up top especially since I don’t have a dyno to run cars on. Using my HPTuners MPVI Pro and PLX SM-AFR it got the job done just fine. We still need to put it on the dyno and run a full 4th gear pull to smooth some top-end stuff out, but it pulls like freight train all through way from 2500-6500 now.

Some might have seen from the cam swap picture that Brian has a pretty nice little plate kit installed on the car as well. Once the final top-end tuning is finished on the dyno we’ll be installing and configure the new HSW MicroEdge + Nitrous Controller in conjunction with the NOS 150 plate kit that’s on the car right now. This new controller will give us full control of pretty much everything involved with setting up a safe nitrous system. Once the time comes I’ll do a little write-up about the controller. I’m pretty damn excited to get to use it since I’ll likely be running one with my L92 setup some day.

For those who like cool pictures of cars, here’s another one to go along with the last image from Galveston.

Tuned By Jake » Nitrous

Brian’s Trans Am