NASCAR Chevy SB2 V8 Turned Into a Racing V6!?

Wait, what without a doubt Racing generates the best stories and I want to share with you one of my favorites. It may look like your standard small-block Chevrolet, but what you're actually looking at is the world's best-disguised 660-horsepower V6. Now the trick. It's just that if you want to get maximum power, you have to do a lot more than just unplug the rear cables to plug them in. Keith was willing to show us everything he's made and I think it's fascinating to watch the way he thinks when he builds these. engines to break records and differentiate yourself from the rest, honestly there's really very little reason to go to the trouble of building a high speed v6 using a NASCAR SB, as a base, unless you're talking about finding an edge in a world of

racing

and That's exactly what automotive specialist engine builder Keith Norton is doing here after a long career building winning stock car

racing

engines, including the Daytona 500.

Jordan has become a major player in stock car racing. land speed, where a slim rulebook allows for greater creativity for hot rod goons. The racing team plans to use this engine to break the current Bonneville speed record of 228.7 miles per hour in the rear-engine gasoline roaster class with a displacement of less than 261 cubic inches. The problem with building such a small naturally aspirated V8 is you. You still need a lot of bore to fit big valves and get a lot of airflow, but that in turn leaves the stroke so short that it's hard to build compression, and if that's a little confusing, I'll let Dorton explain it himself, so the question is why.

Could someone take a V8 and build a V6? Well this goes into the bottle for land speed racing and they have different classes based on cubic inches. This particular class is limited to 261 cubic inches, actually sixty point nine nine, and if you do that. in a v8 there are so many cubic inches of super fuel per cylinder it's hard to get compression now that we've done it and had success with it the most compression we get is about eleven not even 11 out of 1 so it shocked me one office . is b6 and that way we would have another 12 cubic inches that are super silver and we could maintain 13 to 1 compression, so we did it the simplest way I found, was to simply eliminate two silvers in the experiences of a block that Lo We've done 90 degree V-sixes in the past where they were packed with a lot of vibration and we didn't want that for drag runts like we would out there, so we just limited the silver back to the cylinders we went up. with about two hundred and fifty-nine cubic inches and a compression ratio of about 13 to one, now to assimilate the v8, we invented a way to do it in a crank pin boat song just like connecting rods would and we've already read this. engine so this is a rebuild and it ran as smoothly as any v8 you have seen now and has a unique sound.

Also, it's kind of a cross between a v8 v6 and vacation when I got involved in building this engine. Keith was almost done with the short block, but I think I can catch you up. The basis for this build is an SB racing engine previously built by Hendrick Motorsports and competed in the NASCAR Cup Series and no, I don't know which car or Dorton likes the sp2 architecture for land speed racing because it breathes very well and develops Tons of power in the upper rpm ranges. The crankshaft is a Bryant billet piece with three and a quarter inches of stroke attached to the r6 crank rods that are. six inch, 350 mil Sloan and a half dozen custom molybdenum pistons finish the rotating assembly in the lifter Valley dorten is pressed into these machined aluminum slugs to seal the old galleries that feed the lifter bores for the back of the cylinders, This will help maintain the proper level. oil pressure on the rest of the engine and also seals the lifter valley so the multistage dry sump oil pump can clean it.

Here's another look at those molybdenum pistons. This is a rebuild so the pistons are not new to the TDC, the pistons are flush with the deck. of the block to maximize compression and the same in the valve pockets are absolutely as small as possible, while the cam is a big boy in every sense of the word, grinded by crane cams from a lump of steel billet specifically for this build, the camshaft is 55 millimeters in diameter to resist twisting because even the slightest twist can ruin valve timing events. It is a solid roller and has also been gun drilled to lighten it up a bit being a race cam and polish that Norton has worked hard to develop and prefers to keep.

However, much of the detail of this cam is for itself, since this engine is designed to run at 9000 rpm and above, we know that the duration is huge at over 270 degrees at 50,000 rapid for both the valves of intake and exhaust once a racing belt is in place. The drive system is used to control timing because it is more resistant to stretching than the timing chain, as there have been machine jobs covering both the block and cylinder heads. Dorton checks the piston, valve clearance before final assembly, turns out it's at its tightest, the intake valve has 70mm of clearance and the exhaust has 170 mil, that includes the 40,000 head gasket. thickness.

That's pretty tight for admission, but it's doable. He also checks the radial clearance in the valve pockets which is right against the wall of the pocket, of course the intake valve. It should be a few thousand higher in the pocket and the wall slopes back quite a bit so the clearance is actually greater than the driver's. I would suggest that there are no rods or pistons in most rear cylinders, after all those are numbers 7 and 8 including the pistons would only add friction within the engine, so Dorton designed a machine with this weight that would be Clamped over the connecting rod throat, it simulates the weight of the two connecting rods and pistons and exactly how they came up with the exact mass to keep the engine balanced. which for itself the cylinder head is a high flow sp2 model that has already been retrofitted by Hendrick Motorsports note the plate above the combustion chamber at the rear which is simply an aluminum cover that has been bolted into place and machined flat with the rest of the cylinder head the combustion The chamber and ports have also been covered with epoxy for the operation of the three chambers in each head;

However, the intake valves are two-inch diameter 180 mils with a six-millimeter stem, while the exhausts are one-inch 580 with a thicker 7-millimeter stem to help them resist. the high heat of the exhaust gases escaping, that gold color on the intakes is a coating to help strengthen the soft titanium they are made of and here's a look at the intake manifold. This is a high rise Edelbrock intake with a large plenum to help maximize. power at high revs, if you look inside the manifold you can see the plate that has been placed to help prevent air and fuel from entering the unused runners after it was fired, the gaps around the edges were sealed with silicone.

High-revving engines require very stiff valve trains to This Dorton engine wants to use large, half-inch diameter pushrods that are incredibly stiff, but large diameter pushrods like this simply don't work with many roller lifters. high end because the tie rods limit the diameter of the pushrod, as you can see here, so the block has bushings to accept keyed lifters. Note the slots on the top of the lifter bushings. These have a keyed lift that does not have a tie bar. The key you can see on the top of the lifters is guided by the slot to hold the roller lifter.

Norton wants to use these key lifters, by the way, they are for Morel and have a DLC coating to make the outside surface extremely hard and at 937 mils in diameter they are also significantly larger than the standard lifter size 8 :42, allowing the lifter roller wheel to be a little larger, reducing stress on the valvetrain as a whole. Multi-layer steel joints were chosen to help. seals the combustion chambers and is 40,000 thick when the heads are fully bolted on to go with the long-lasting Crane Cams roller. Jordan is using a set of nested valve springs from the package, they have 160 pounds of seat pressure and 600 open by the way.

Total valve lift will be in the range of 800 mils for intakes and 850 for exhausts. Retainers are machined tool steel for minimal weight. You can see here where the valve springs were left for the rear cylinder to hold the oil. To prevent dripping into the combustion chamber, the valve guide has been tapped and then sealed with small pipe plugs. Bolting on a set of sp2 cylinder heads can be a bit of a pain because it's designed specifically for racing, it just won't work with standard head bolts. in some places you have to use bolts with the SB the ports were given priority so you have to screw the head through the input ports in a couple of places and then add a plug later and the plugs aren't either Interchangeable because the bottom has been ground to match the specific shape of the input port it is located on.

By the way, here you can see the bolt extending slightly from the port floor. Now this really isn't a hindrance to power because of how the RPMs are leveled out with an SB for everyone. the flow passes through the roof of the port. Another quirk is that some of the outer bolts are directly under the exhaust flange and require a crow's foot on the torque wrench to tighten it. This is an engine that definitely requires patience to build. I already mentioned that Dorten will use half-inch diameter ultra-stiff pushrods to limit flex. Ended up using 8-inch 825,000 intakes and eight-inch 875 pushrods for the exhaust because the valve stems are so narrow to reduce the overall mass of the valve train. will be added to each valve stem to provide a little more diameter for the roller tip of the rocker arms to slide through the full stroke sp2 rocker arms used by NASCAR Cup teams in the past, we are not adjustable and wedges had to be used.

Adjusting valve lash is a very complicated and time-consuming process, which probably would have caused problems at Bonneville, where you're always short on time, so Dorton worked with tnd for this set of aluminum rocker arms with adjusters on the valve stem. push. On the rocker arm side, the aluminum tendis are super stable with minimal mass, so they won't hurt the higher speed performance of the engine rocker arm. The ratio is 1.8 to 1 for the intakes and 1.9, 5 to 1 for the exhaust and, as we mentioned before, total. Lift is in the range of eight hundred thousandths of an inch for the intake valves and 850 for the exhausts.

Cold clearance is set at eight and ten thousandths for the intakes and exhausts when the engine is hot, both will grow approximately ten thousandths of an inch. The SP2 architecture uses a separate valley cover and intake manifold, two totally separate the hot coolant from the air and fuel charge flowing through the intake and again you can see the plate blocking the two rear ports inside admission and here's another signature NASCAR trick. The guys came up with the idea that Dorten likes to take advantage of this is a sixth stage Auto Verde dry sump oil pump that draws everything from both the dry sump and the Valley lifter to virtually eliminate any power the wind steals.

The old crankcase is cut in one piece. of billet aluminum and seals against the main caps to create chambers under each crankshaft. There is a pickup under each one so that the oil is practically sucked out of the engine as quickly as possible. The distributor is used only to direct the spark to the proper spark plug at the front. and the MSD crank trigger is mounted on the ATI shock housing to control ignition timing. He may have noticed a different black carburetor earlier in the video. At this point, Norton has already done some testing and determined that the 216 cubic inch v6 performs best at 1150 CFM.

Holley Dominator carburetor, yes you heard that right, from the v6 with a Dominator auto bolted on the endtop, that's because dirt speed racing is all about maximum airflow, we don't even care how the engine runs below 6,000 rpm, this bad boy won't even do that. start running until most engines have already exceeded their redline the first time this engine was built. Dorton modified the distributor to fire only six points instead of the usual eight, but the race team was never able to get the system to work properly with its setup in the race. auto, so this season he's letting the ignition system think it's still running on a v8 for testing.

We've simply grounded the two rear spark plugs and wires against the dynamics, that's pretty good. Athenian fire, but an uncontained spark in a race car isn't exactly a good idea, so he's also made this aluminum container that will hold the spark plugs and won't allow any gas to reach the spark, so let's burn some gasoline racing again, no one is going to need to convert a perfectly good V8 into an ultra-high rpm V6. unless you're trying to find some kind of advantage in the race, but if you love horsepower engines you can definitely appreciate the ingenuity here, the Dino's pull didn't even start until 6000 rpm and when we pulled the handle at 9200 rpm it had not yet reached maximum power with a maximum torque of 393 point 3 pound-feet at 70,300 rpm and 663 point 3 horsepower at 9200 rpm.

This engine is a little beast, incredibly, it has over two and a half horsepower per cubic inch naturally. Aspirated engine and we were dynoing on a 97 degree day here in the south. Dorner's calculations say the bully hot rod racing team should have more than enough horsepower to completely break the current record of 228.7 miles per hour at Bonneville. more power, but 9200 rpm is simply the redline Norton assigned to the engine to ensure its health during those tough 5-mile long bursts of acceleration through the salt. Hello, thanks for looking. I'll try to update the results after Bonneville. We'll let you know how this engine performed and if you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button and consider subscribing for more.Engine building videos in the future, thanks again.