What is the lightest you can make a 3rd gen V8/manual Camaros by removing anything that isn't necessary to drive the car? I'm trying to estimate the weight of one of these cars in race car trim using mainly stock body panels (with the exception of the hood) and not cutting out any of the innerstructure panels. I've heard that V6 cars are lighter due to not having extra reinforcement in the rocker panels that the V8's got: is there any validity to this, and if so how much lighter were they really?

According to the Automobile Catalog website the '89 Iroc Z "TPI, manual 5"had a curb weight of 3263 lbs

 

Your average LS swap knocks up to 100lbs or more off the car. My car weighed 3080 lbs dry (no fluids) in full trim and full interior sans rear seats. LS swap + tubular suspension parts frees up quite a bit of weight. With fluids, myself and any gear I'm probably going down the road at 3400 lbs. I could probably knock another 100lbs off the car if I switched wheels, lost the roll bar and change to a single exhaust from true 3" dual. Fiberglass hood would help as well. I think some serious road racers have gotten their 3rd gens down to 2700 lbs or so.

 

No, at least not for 3rd gen Camaros.

 

Do you mean an LS swap with with an all aluminum LS engine? Most of the engines people call LS engines have cast iron blocks, which I think are probably more popular to swap since they are more plentiful used. I imagine by now original LS1 engines are getting hard to find since it was so long ago that they were offered, and only in a few car models. I don't see cast iron block "LS" engines being any lighter than gen I small blocks (with aluminum heads) since they are the same basic size engines. What people call "LS" engines GM called generation III and IV small blocks.

How much weight does a basic 10 point roll cage add to a 3rd gen?

 

You are correct that any iron block variant will be heavier, roughly 100lbs over the all aluminum versions, however overall they are still much lighter than the SBC's that these cars came with. The iron blocked LS still had aluminum heads and plastic intake manifolds compared to the all iron 305's and mostly iron TPI mills. Combine that with a tubular k-member and you are still dropping a lot of weight off the car. I am unsure how much the cage weighs. My four point may weigh something around 35 to 55 lbs give or take.

 

Thanks.

That's why mentioned a gen1 small block with aluminum heads to compare to the newer gen III and IV engines.

I think GM had already switched to aluminum intake manifolds on most engines by the time our cars came along. I know that's still heavier than plastic but it's lighter than iron. Those old cast iron intakes were like boat anchors.

 

The TBI intakes were iron. The TPI were aluminum.

 

The TBI intake I have is aluminum. Maybe they switched as some point in the 3rd gen run.

 

While there are cast iron TBI intake manifolds and some of those don't even have provisions for an EGR valve I've never seen anything but aluminum TBI intakes on passenger cars and light to medium duty trucks.

I think the cast iron ones were marine and very HD trucks, vans, the HD truck frames they build other stuff on.

 

You are both correct and I stand corrected. I went and dug out my old intake and it indeed is aluminum. Heavy sucker at that.

 

Mine has an all aluminum drivetrain and suspension (C4), steel body hardtop, steel hood, fiberglass front and rear bumpers, rear mounted battery, rear seat delete, harness bar, dual 3” exhaust, 16 gallons of fuel, and me in the car weighed in at 3366 lb. The real benefit for my car is the weight distribution at 52/48 with cross weights within 3 lb. side to side.

 

God I love your car. Also, don't forget your wheels. Forgelines are incredibly light. I'm still running big cast Cray wheels that are fatter than me. I think I can shed 20lbs a wheel with a set of forgelines or BC forged units, not to mention the power gains.

 

Mine is a little more than a 10 point cage but all the pieces of my cage are close to 182 pounds. I would guess a basic 10 point cage would be closer to 130-150 pounds.

How light you want it depends on how stock do you want to keep it. Mine is a completely gutted out race car. Fiberglass doors and hood. Lexan tee tops and windows including the rear. A sheet of aluminum for the rear deck lid. Aluminum interior. Anything not required for speed or safety has been removed. My race weight sitting on the starting line line is around 3100 pounds. That's with an aluminum head big block, powerglide transmission and 9" diff with an aluminum center section.

Keeping the car street legal means having to keep a lot of stuff in the car that could be removed for a track only car. Things like changing the windshield from glass to Lexan only saves 10 pounds.

 

I've read of people getting them down to 2700-2800 in drag race form(not including driver). Maybe lighter but we're talking extreme and $$$ cause the faster you go, the more safety or stronger stuff you need.

Early cars like my 83 TA has an aluminum crash bar/bumper support that is like 9lbs lighter than the steel one. Guy around here was parting a car out and i kinda wanted to get the front alum support, for my 85 Ta but i may just make a small tube steel one for it. Found a nice used aftermarket moly bumper support for my 96 firebird, thing is like 5lbs, don't think anyone makes em for thirgens?

Lots of stuff like wheels, battery, manual seats or just trimming up the wiring harness. Wish i had another set of 4th gen cloth seats for my 83, they are a tad lighter and getting expensive.

 

Our ~85 Firebird built for SCCA C Prepared class autocross had to have weight added, about 300#, to make minimum weight of 2750 with the cast iron 305 and TH350, 9-bolt diff. Gutted interior, 8-point roll cage, Kirkey seats, gutted steel door panels, Lexan windshield and back glass, and fiberglass asphalt car pin-on hood. This is it when it was at that weight:



We've since built a 5.0 L LS1 and added a 9" diff with aluminum pumpkin. We've also swapped the rear deck panel to fiberglass, as are the front fenders and hinged fiberglass hood now. Sadly, I haven't weighed it since. Really need to.

 

That's a nice looking Firebird. Where did you get your lexan backglass and does it attach like the original one does? What kind and size are those wheels and tires?

 

The Lexan in that picture was from the original build, and we weren't part of that. We did replace the front and back glass with Optic Armor pieces, and they're held up very well. They're not cheap, but are really quality pieces, and the price per year has been good. :-). We got the drop-in units, since they required the least amount of modification to install. The fronts are set in factory-style butyl and secured with screws.

The rear window is hinged, using the factory hinges at the top, and at the bottom it's sort of pinned between the rear deck piece and a piece of 1/4" square bar material that's welded to the rear fenders. The 'wing' portion of the rear window is held in place with Dzus fasteners on each side.

The car was originally a 'CP-lite' car, in that if you ran a 5L engine and 10" wide wheels, you had a 2700# minimum weight, vs. taking a weight penalty for 10+" wide wheels and any engine over 5L. So it's running Real Custom Wheels 10"x16" wheels with 10"x16" Hoosier slicks. When the SCCA eliminated the weight penalty for bigger wheels, we went with 12" front and 13" rear wheels and similar sized slicks. There was a wheel diameter penalty then, but that's now been eliminated so we're now running 12" Forgestar 18" wheels and 335-18 Hoosier A7's on all 4 corners. While it's a heavier wheel/tire combination, it does put more tire on the ground, especially in front, and allows us to tuck the wheel/tire package further under the wheel wells, making the car 'narrower'.

Real Wheels is no longer in business, sadly, or we'd have gone to them to see if they could build us 18" replicas of what we have in the 10X16 size. Those are really nice-looking wheels.

 

Thats impressive. You are saying you got the car to ~2500 lbs with an all iron smallbock. And then had to add weight per rules ?

 

Assuming about 2500#. And yes, iron block 305 with aluminum Corvette heads, TH350 and 9-bolt diff. I wasn't part of the original build. It was put together by a bunch of (really) Texas Aggies in College Station, Texas. Many of those guys were engineering students and gear heads, so probably spent a lot of time figuring out where to use lighter parts, where available. I do know the car had to weigh 2700# and had several hundred pounds of lead on board. I've never weighed all the lead (I keep finding new pieces bolted here and there), but it looks like a lot, probably around 300# worth. We're still running some lead, but since the new engine/diff, fiberglass fenders and new hood, as well as the new wheels and tires, I haven't reweighed it. I do need to. Wanting to get my scales out and weigh the SVO, too, since we 'added lightness' to it during its restomod. We cut up a couple of bars and slid them into the subframe connectors before installing them. The subframe connectors probably weigh 100# themselves. :-)

 

FYI- Real is still around. https://www.realwheel.net

 

What's the point in running fiberglass fenders on these cars, because the original fenders these cars have don't weigh that much to begin with? To me the only body pieces worth replacing on these cars to save weight are the hood and decklid/hatch.

 

I might have been confusing them with the manufacturer of our 16X10" wheels. I don't remember the name at the moment, but know they are out of business, as they were when I was trying to get some 16X12" wheels made.

Yes, they are still in business, but only make wheels in 15" or 16" diameter. I was wanting 18" diameter wheels so we could tuck 12" wide wheels into our front wheel wells to take advantage of the wider wheel and narrower overall width.

 

Yes, the steel fenders are incredibly light! The ones that were on our car were even lighter than OEM, as they were cheap Chinese knock-offs installed specifically to save weight. We needed to cut the wheel openings some for clearance for the wider wheel/tire combo we were going to and I didn't want to cut the steel units. I didn't take a scale to them, but the 'glass units felt just a bit, maybe a pound, or two, lighter than the steel ones, so it was a win-win. And I still have the uncut steel units hanging in our shop!!

But yeah, if you're looking to 'add lightness', the OEM front fenders is really not a place to do so, unless you're wanting that last ounce out. The doors can be made stupidly-light, too, if you cut enough away. They get really flimsy and 'floppy' like that, though.

The real weight in the hatch is in the glass. The car came to us with Lexan windshield and hatch glass already installed. They've been replace with the Optic Armor units, since the Lexan was showing it's age. I think I pulled 2# off the car by going to a fiberglass rear deck lid. Again, didn't weigh the difference. It would be sort of easy to check, though.