Accessories
Rev up your engines and buckle up, folks, because Granatelli Motorsports is unleashing the ultimate solution to your vacuum woes with their 12V Electric Vacuum Pump Kit! Picture this: you’ve got your hot rod sitting pretty in the garage, but you’re struggling with power brakes, wipers, or engine management issues due to vacuum deficiencies. Well, fear not, because Granatelli has your back with their state-of-the-art kit, designed to tackle these challenges head-on and turbocharge your ride’s performance.
If you’re in the planning stages of building your car, or even if you have finished and are driving it, there are lots of free or inexpensive things you can do to make your ride faster and/or more efficient. This month, The Auto Builder gives you 25 of those ideas. Most of these free tips simply involve putting your car on a diet. Every 100 pounds of weight removed from your car equals dropping 1/10th of a second at the strip. Even though you may not be racing, the same theory applies to the street, and also to the extra weight you must lug around.
The Power Programmer is designed so that once the parameters are established and loaded, the unit is pulled and the program remains in the onboard computer until you elect to remove it. The HyperPAC is different; this unit stays in place. In addition to the three stages of performance tuning—the HyperPAC has all of the performance programming benefits of the Power Programmer—it also has diagnostics; an engine monitor with a complete gauge display; a dynamometer, which includes such items such as a horsepower graph; and our favorite, a dragstrip program. This program actually monitors real-time engine operating conditions, has a Christmas tree start, displays a timeslip and will provide you with “magazine-type road test” acceleration times in 10-mile increments. It will record and display important engine operating conditions throughout the run and will display drive wheel horsepower versus vehicle speed after each run—in both table and graph formats.
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Adding a nitrous spray bar to an intercooler is a proven way to lower the intake air temps and consequently give a more dense charge to the combustion chamber for more horsepower. We’ve been seeing more and more intercooler spray bars popping up on both performance and show-n-go cars.
If you are going to connect anything automatic to your car, especially when dealing with electricity, lead and acid, you owe it to yourself to do a bit more research rather than pulling just any super-discounted, off-the-shelf item and connecting it to something as potentially volatile as a lead-acid battery. But we have, haven’t we?
Have you ever noticed how some people can take their car to the strip and look as if they’ve raced all their lives, while others look totally out of control in the bleach box and during staging? More often than not, the driver with the calm, cool and collected approach seems to regularly trigger the win light. The reason for this smoothness isn’t completely initiated by the driver; in most instances, it is the correlation between man and machine.
All of your hard work and efforts could go up in smoke before you have a chance to do anything about it. That is, unless you have a quality set of gauges to monitor initial and ongoing engine parameters. Gauges allow you to know exactly what is going on within your engine at a glance. Is the oil pressure too low? Is the engine running hot? Is the battery charging?
