Alright I Gteched my car friday night and i had a best of 15.81. the tank was full and i had the subs in the back but assuming the GTECH was hooked up right 3.73 posi slowed me down 3 tenths. i get out of the hole so much faster and the whole time i am going the car seems so much faster. could it be that it is just too much gear for the car right now. i still finish under 5000 in third gear.
thanks

 

its very possible that those gears can slow down your car. See, the gears will make you engine rev faster and the car will get out of its power band. Therefore, making the car go slower. Sure, it feels faster, and it may be off the line, but top end, the car will just not pull anymore without some other go-fast goodies under the hood.

 

yeah i know i just didnt think that they would actually slow me down at this point

 

Probably running lean now that you've done enough mods. Go ahead and ask ANY speed density EFI guy if he needs to tune after every mod he does to his car....he'll say and I quote, "duh."
Blackbird had the same problem and it has nothing to do with the gears and posi, usually a traction and fuel/timing problem.

 

This makes no sense...if you get out of the powerband faster, you're revving faster, and accelerating faster!! Less time at a certain speed means you're moving through them faster, does that make sense? Try a 2.56 rear...you'd be in first gear for a LONG time....and someone with 3.73s in the same car would be at a MUCH higher speed in a much shorter time than you, and he spent less time in 1st (which is why I'm saying he won and you lost...)

 

LoL, yeah Sonar, that didn't make much sense.

 

Yeah gears help... but if hes out of his power band, which is defined as the product of teh torque x the angular velocity, the engine is just not gonna be making power. Simple as that... This is not to say that gears dont increase the efficency of teh drive train and help u go faster but more can be done to see even better benifits

At high rpms, teh engine doesnt get as much air as it needs and expends larger portions of the energy from the fuel ridding itself of exaust gasses because of the **** poor swirl port heads, exaust, and stock tbi on these cars. This causes the torque to fall off sharply and soon the horsepower output falls off sharply too. These engines just have really narrow powerbands in the stock configuration. To take full advantage of having a better gearset, widen the powerband with heads and better exaust. One thing is that is often overlooked is that some of the engines power output is taken up as rotational and linear kenetic energy by the heavy iron and aluminum bits that make up the rotating assembly. Hence, even less power at the wheels.

 

But to get the most power at the wheels, you'd want to run the engine close to the flywheel HP peak, theoretically. You're making less wheel HP at the torque peak than at HP peak, in the same gear...even though the top end on our stock TBI cars sucks, it's still making more HP up there, than lower in the power band.

 

basically what im saying is loose the lo3 heads, headers and lame *** stock cam and get soemthing better... Id do that before the intake and exaust. U wll definatly see some faster 1/4 times