Saturday 4 January 2014

8V POWER: The Worlds most powerful Lancia Dedra

I enjoy my job, sometimes I get to go to work and say 'I've had an idea, let's have a go and see if it works'. Sometimes I get messages from people who think the same way, sometimes they're serious.


Last Spring I had an email from a chap called Glenn in Norway who wanted 450+bhp.


From an 8v.




Which he's going to put in a Dedra.





See the problem is not only is he getting overtaken, his mates are taking time to give him the finger as they're passing by....








Something had to be done and this wasn't going to be cracking nuts with a nutcracker, we wanted to Sledgehammer the opposition.


I like a challenge and we've already created the UKs first 2.2 integrale and the most powerful 16vt Coupe so I thought why not?

After doing a lot of development work on the flowbench I know we do more to an 8v head than anyone else to make it work, but still it just doesn't have the flow potential that its younger 16v brother does. The port is very short and the short side radius not a great shape, it isn't a good combination. It will however create truck loads of torque and torque is important, it's less glamorous than a big BHP figure, but it's more relevant in everyday driving conditions.
Anyhow Glenn says he's serious about this project so I say ok, let's see what we can do, put some money up and lets get busy.

The head and cams were going to be most the important part of this project, pretty much make or break - go too big on the ports and it will ruin low speed performance, go too small and it will strangle the top end.
So I do the usual Stage 3 stuff to the head and design the cams for his application using some pretty useful software we've got and I reckon if everythings perfect he'll see around 430bhp at the fly on pump fuel.
That's UK pump fuel.
Hang on a minute, don't they have E85 at the pump in Norway? A quick email confirms they do so I advise him to buy some fecking big injectors (technical term), I supply him a fuel pump and tell him about some mods which will provide the injectors with enough fuel.

Off across to Norway go forged pistons, rods, new crank, bearings, gaskets, billet steel flywheel etc and the head comes to me. 'Has seen better days' doesn't really sum it up! This has been one well and hard used head that's for sure, the squish pads are eroded by detonation, the valve guides have 9mm holes in them (valves are 8mm!) and because of this the seats have been pounded into some strange shapes.





The valves are big old things so to help the engine rev a bit more freely without them bouncing uncontrollably I fit lightened ones along with lash caps and shimless buckets, pretty soon it's looking as it should do again:


Cams were custom made to our spec in the U.S. for this application, in fact we gave up using off-the-shelf designs many years ago, every engine is a different spec and so the cams should be too - cams are very much one of the most misunderstood yet most important parts of a successful engine, i've seen a bespoke exhaust cam alone make 40bhp more than an off-the-shelf one before now.



Glenn did a sterling job of putting it all together and also gets an intake and exhaust manifold made to compliment the rest of the components.
Once it was built he took it down to Frederiks engine dyno, Frederik is no stranger to FLA engines, he's mapped plenty and owned a few himself including a Q4 at the moment.

Some fun and games with it blowing the intercooler pipes off:






As you can see, the results were 485bhp and (more importantly) 455 ft/lbs of neck snapping torque. Glenn reports that it's a great car to drive with the boost gauge reading 1 bar by 4000rpm then hitting full boost by 4600, it's a pretty handy car to overtake with.

Frederik contacted me afterwards to say whilst it was impressive, they could have got more power with even bigger injectors and the turbo would have stood a bigger exhaust housing without compromising spool, as the engine was making so much heat energy that it was going into surge at lower engine speeds. 500+ would then have been easily available


I wonder when we'll see the first 2.2 8v engine? Now that would be something else....

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Welcome to the Deltaparts Blog, here you will find, well, anything which is on my mind I guess, but mainly things to do with the Lancia Delta integrale and in particular anything to do with my business, Deltaparts. It will be a bit irregular as it's not every day (or even week) that something worth mentioning happens. I would like to try and make it interesting - at least to some people anyhow, but also hopefully accessible and readable for the average 'man on the street' so I won't bore you with loads of large words, bombastic overblown sentences or technical jargon. I will describe on here how lots of the parts that we sell came about as there isn't room on the website ( www.deltaparts.co.uk ) to explain. I hope you enjoy reading it as I do writing it, when something becomes a chore you know it's time to stop doing it....