Field Report: 1200hp+ EVO | 11,000rpm & 'Illegal' On The Track.

Speaker 1: 0:00

Well, it's been a while since I drag raced my own Evo. I have still got a soft spot for Evos and drag racing, so this white Evo 6 behind me obviously caught my eye. We're here with Dom Rigoli from Tony Rigoli Performance to find out a little bit more about it. Welcome to High Performance Academy's tuned in Field Report podcast series. In these special midweek episodes, we look back through our archives to find the best conversations we've had through years worth of attending the best automotive events across the globe. We've pulled the audio from these tech field interviews with some of the industry's most well known figures and presented it in podcast format for you to enjoy as a quick hit of insider knowledge. So this is the Koval Evo, dominic. Yeah, give us a bit of a rundown. First of all, how much power does it make and what sort of quarter mile times does it produce?

Speaker 2: 0:59

On the old setup it was making around 1200 horsepower and run at 88, 169.

Speaker 1: 1:05

1200 horsepower. We're talking flywheel horsepower here.

Speaker 2: 1:08

Yeah, a bit close like hub. Horsepower, yeah, and it run at 8.8, at 169. We didn't really get much track time because the car's not ticked, so it was like one run and get booted off.

Speaker 1: 1:18

So when you say the car isn't ticked, it means that legally you can't run 8.8s here in Australia.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Yeah, isn't teched. It means that legally you can't run 8.8s here in Australia. Yeah, I think the cutoff is like a 10.5 or a 10.0.

Speaker 1: 1:28

So you blew past that by quite a ways. And when you say it's not teched, this means that there's no roll cage. So in terms of that, safety equipment is a little bit maybe under par for the times and speed it's running. That's correct. All right, let's just skip over the safety legalities. I'm interested what goes into a 4G63 that's making 1200 horsepower at the hubs?

Speaker 2: 1:51

We're still on the cast block. It's one of our own custom rotating assemblies. And then, yeah, head work, valve, train, just all the basic stuff. And then, yeah, you need the turbo to push it and a good ECU to do the job All right?

Speaker 1: 2:03

well, let's break all of that down. We live in a time where billet blocks are literally everywhere and it's unusual now, really in the 4G63 world, to see someone making 1200 horsepower at the hubs with a cast block. Where do you see the benefits or pros and cons of cast versus billet at that power level?

Speaker 2: 2:24

Look, we've never tried a billet block for G63. Yeah, we kind of really haven't found the end of the cast engine, so I'd kind of like to stick with it. Once we do find the end of it then, yeah, it'll be an option.

Speaker 1: 2:35

So this is really a case of if it isn't broken, don't fix it. Pretty much, yeah, does that also mean that you're seeing a lot of people potentially move to billet when there's no need.

Speaker 2: 2:46

I personally think, yes, you know, and I don't really want to develop a billet engine to be strapping them into streetcars. And you know we do a lot of roll racing. So the drags is one thing. You've got a billet engine, you do a run, you let it cool down, you know what I mean. And yeah, it's good and you can be fast, but you take it around to the motorsport park and start doing laps with it. It's just a different application Now.

Speaker 1: 3:07

I mean, I don't know, given that obviously you are developing the factory cast iron block, I'm not sure how much experience you've got with these billet blocks. We do hear a lot of downsides about the expansion coefficient of the billet aluminium versus a cast iron block and the requirements therefore for setting clearances different the way the car or the engine is warmed up and cooled down versus a factory cast iron block. Can you talk to us about that at all?

Speaker 2: 3:32

Yeah, well, look the factory cast block. You're not going to beat it because it's designed to drive on the road and it's not going to expand and do anything. Ugly. Yeah, where's the billet block? Everything just loosens up as it gets warmer and warmer and you know it's not real practical for someone that wants to build an engine and you just build it and it's done. It's more of a maintenance thing in my opinion.

Speaker 1: 3:57

With a cast iron block you've got a water jacket. Obviously, that's key to making the engine reliable and control temperature on the street on the racetrack. However, that does allow the potential for some flex in the bores. Back in my own drag racing experience, I was solid filling the block with a grout or a concrete product to add rigidity to the block. Anything going on like that with this particular engine.

Speaker 2: 4:21

We do half grout them. Then we do our own dry deck setup on it, and that's what keeps it all together. Then we do our own dry deck setup on it, and that's what keeps it all together.

Speaker 1: 4:28

Let's talk about that dry deck. How does that work and why are you doing that?

Speaker 2: 4:35

So the dry deck you're basically blocking the jackets from the water moving from the head up to the block and you're running it through separately, and that stops compression from going into the radiator. You're always going to get some leakage when you start pushing power. I mean even whether it's a billet block or a cast block, and that just fixes that problem.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Safety there as well, because if you do have a head gasket start to leak, conventionally that pressure gets into the radiator. You can end up with water getting pushed out and if that ends up under the tires, obviously that's not going to end well. That's not. That's right. Now you mentioned you've got your own rotating assembly in this. There's so many combinations in the 4G63 world, obviously 4G63 and 64 blocks, 2 litre, 2.1s, 2.2, 2.4, the list goes on, and everyone has their own sort of secret recipe of what they think is the winning combination. What have you gone with?

Speaker 2: 5:24

Look, I've stuck with the 2.2, we've run pretty fast in a drag car with a 2 litre, but the 2.2 is better, a bit more torque for the road car. And yeah, that's basically all my testing. That's what we've ended up with.

Speaker 1: 5:38

And what's that allow you to rev the engine to Obviously, as you go to the larger capacity combinations, the stroke increases and generally long stroke engines don't like to rev so much. What do you rev this to on the drag strip?

Speaker 2: 5:52

Well, this thing here, we rev it between 10 and 11. But what I've found when we were playing with capacity, the 2.2 and the 2 litre, they're not too much different for what you're giving away. When you get up to the 2.4, then there's kind of no one home. You can still rev them but there's one home. They don't really do anything too much at higher RP. That's right. You can still rev it, but yeah, there's no one there.

Speaker 1: 6:14

Okay, in terms of the rest of the rotating assembly, with the full on drag combination, quite common to go with an aluminium conrod, are you still with a?

Speaker 2: 6:23

We run all of our big stuff. It's got the aluminium conrod in it. We like using. It's got the aluminium conrod in it, we like using. You know there's various cranks. The crank's not a big deal. There's a lot on the market.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Yeah, I've got my own design aluminium rod and we use a custom CP With those aluminium rods. They do have the potential to fatigue and they don't have an unlimited life expectancy like a good quality steel rod. So can you give us some insight into how long they last when they need to be swapped out?

Speaker 2: 6:51

we normally like in a roll racing application, you know, every 12 months pull the engine down and put a fresh load of rods in it. Um, we've pushed past that, we say this car. But you know, that's, that's a good like, a good, safe time I mean, I think the thing that's easy to overlook as well.

Speaker 1: 7:05

With an engine making 1200 horsepower, you're not going to get 100,000 miles between sort of services, are you? It is something that's going to require more regular maintenance and freshen up.

Speaker 2: 7:15

That's right. We've got one of our Evos that makes 800 horsepower and it's got aluminium rods in it and that's going on three years. So yeah, so it does make a difference with the power that it's making too. It's not just the rod.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Coming back to the dry deck setup and the other sort of combination here that's obviously critical, is the actual head gasket combination itself. What you're using to seal. That's sort of always the fuse, if you like, for a high boost turbocharged engine is actually being able to hold the cylinder head onto the block, and this comes down to a combination of the fasteners being used as well as the head gasket itself. Can you give us some insight into what's going on there?

Speaker 2: 7:56

Yeah well, we use fire rings and for the head studs we just use half inch, so sometimes the 625s. Also the OptiTorque studs, we've been using them a lot as well.

Speaker 1: 8:01

So that's ARP Custom Age 625 you mentioned, yeah, and the fire rings. Can you give us a little bit? Obviously we don't have a graphic of this that we can sort of show people, so can you give us a bit of an explanation of what that actually physically looks like and how it works?

Speaker 2: 8:13

Yeah, so it's like an aluminium bronze ring that sits and then you've got a gasket that sits outside of it to seal the oil and water and that ring seals the compression and with heat that ring also expands and that's what seals to the head.

Speaker 1: 8:26

So is that physically located in a groove on the top of the board?

Speaker 2: 8:34

It's in a groove, yeah, and it sits a few feet out above the head gasket and that crush is where you get your clamp.

Speaker 1: 8:37

And this is sort of the combination that's become really the norm in sort of any high boost application, pro mod, et cetera. Pretty much yeah. Are you interested in expanding your automotive knowledge? Start your free lessons with us today at hpacademycom. Forward slash free Now. The elephant in the engine bay, so to speak, of course, is the somewhat elaborate catch can setup. Yeah, talk us through that because it's definitely a feature, not a flaw right.

Speaker 2: 9:04

Yeah, so we've got the catch can on the catch can on the catch can. All right. And yeah, the second two catch cans. They're there clearly to stop oil from dropping on the floor where the primary catch can's not big enough. But you know we are pushing it pretty hard for a wet sump as well. So you know, that's always kind of been a time thing and it's like we'll do it for the next event and we'll do it for the event and it's just never happened.

Speaker 1: 9:27

And again it comes down to if it isn't broken, maybe don't fix it. I think it's probably worth mentioning there, though. People see something like that and it looks maybe a little bit backyardish, but at the end of the day you can't argue with the times that the car is running. The other element here is when people see a catch can getting filled with oil, the obvious sort of jump to conclusion there is that there's something broken in the engine. That's right, yeah, so talk to us about that because it's not always the case.

Speaker 2: 9:54

Yeah, well, look, once you start, you know, running in excess of like 80 pound, 90 pound, yeah, you're going to get a lot of decompression, you know. So, yeah, really, it should be dry sump and it eliminates that problem. But you, it should be dry sump and it eliminates that problem. But there's a reason why we don't run the dry sump on it. We're just keeping it simple. It's easier to maintain. This is not our prettiest engine bay, but this is just bad to the bone. Racing. We're just doing laps in it. That's what it's about.

Speaker 1: 10:24

And, as I mentioned, at the end of the day it's definitely doing the job. So to just elaborate on that, I mean when you're running 80 plus PSI, or even 50 plus PSI, for that matter, we'd like to think that the block is nice and rigid, and we talked about the fact that solid filling the block is quite a common solution. But those bores are flexing and that's going to involve what we refer to as blow by, where the combustion pressure is actually escaping down past the rings into the sump, and that's what causes the engine to breathe correct.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Yeah well, a combination of that and you know the loose clearance you've got to run to run that sort of boost. You know I do put it down more to the loose clearance because you know we have checked these things after we've run them and you know they don't twist the bores, you know, like some other make of engines do I mean eventually they do, but I'm pretty confident it's more the clearance that's given us that blow by.

Speaker 1: 11:09

So by clearance there you're referring to the piston to cylinder, wall clearance Piston to cylinder wall, because if you tighten that up, then it'll grab, you know. And of course you're running a 2618 forged piston as well, which has a higher thermal expansion coefficient than a factory cast piston, so by necessity it's looser anyway. That's correct. Yeah, what about fuel Safe? To assume that you?

Speaker 2: 11:32

We have been running methanol, but we've had to go back to the E85 to race at the motorsport park. Is that just a legal requirement, then?

Speaker 1: 11:38

Yeah, so I'm interested in terms of boost capability for E85,. Do you see a limit in terms of what the fuel can actually cope with boost pressure wise, or is the other element that comes into that is, what's the power differential between an E85 tune-up and a methanol tune-up?

Speaker 2: 11:57

You lose torque, but we put the nitrous back on, so you're not really losing much. But they definitely don't last as long at that boost level with the ethanol in them.

Speaker 1: 12:09

So when you say it doesn't last as long, what is the where component? What's failing? That's when you start twisting balls. Now you mentioned earlier that a good quality ECU is essential as well to control a combination like this and keep it alive. So what are you running here?

Speaker 2: 12:25

It's got an Emtron KV8 in it.

Speaker 1: 12:28

And what are the sort of elements of the KV8 that you feel are essential to keep the engine alive and operating at the sort of power and RPM levels you're operating at?

Speaker 2: 12:38

One of the biggest things is the triggering system. If your timing's not spot on, there's no room for error.

Speaker 1: 12:45

So the 4G63 or at least the late model 4G63's already run a crank trigger system where it's actually taking engine RPM directly from the snout of the crankshaft, which is obviously where we want it from. Then we've got engine position coming from a camshaft. Do you still run that factory system? Factory, yeah, so that works really well. Yeah, in terms of anything else, in terms of motorsport functionality, you're running with that.

Speaker 2: 13:08

Emtron. We run the drive by wire on the intake, so yous would have touched on that before.

Speaker 1: 13:14

Just elaborate on what that actually does for our listeners.

Speaker 2: 13:17

So for this car we end up using it on the launch control. So basically, when the car's on the start line and we're building boost, that valve will open to control the boost and then it'll close as the car leaves when we want it to close.

Speaker 1: 13:30

So why is that more effective than controlling that boost on the start line using the likes of the exhaust side wastegate?

Speaker 2: 13:38

You can never recover it as quick. That's the main thing. So you open your wastegate and then you close it. Then there's a delay.

Speaker 1: 13:45

So you're actually losing exhaust gas energy to drive the turbocharger. If you're controlling the boost via the wastegate versus bleeding off the excess boost on the inlet, that's correct. And in terms of boost going down the drag strip or roll racing for that matter how are you controlling that? Is that versus gear?

Speaker 2: 14:03

or speed Boost by gear. We run torque limit as well, so we've got a few things going on.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Let's just talk about the drivetrain as well, because this is another weak point with pretty much anything that's making that much more power than factory say four times the factory power. What have you got in point with pretty much anything that's making that much more power than factory, like, say, sort of four, four times the the factory power? Uh, what have you got in there?

Speaker 2: 14:21

we only just recently upgraded it to a full billet transfer case. So this particular model the transfer cases are smaller and we had we did have a custom gear set in that on the standard case that that done well for a while and then we ended up snapping that output and now we've converted it to the late, which means different crossmember reposition, the steering rack, and it's allowed us to go to the bigger transfer case and we've gone to the full billet. So, yeah, you can't really get any stronger.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Does that make it indestructible, or is it still a wear item?

Speaker 2: 14:53

We haven't really crash tested it, but yeah Look, the standard case does really well, so you know. So I cannot see that being a problem.

Speaker 1: 15:00

And in terms of the rest of the actual gearbox itself.

Speaker 2: 15:07

The gearbox is a Samsonis, so just straight out how they come out of their factory and then in the R-Sens it's got an R200.

Speaker 1: 15:11

So that, samsonis, coming back to that, just a conventional, pretty standard sequential dog engagement gear set. Yeah, that's correct, and I assume there you're using a clutchless shifting with a strain gauge or something like that on the gear lever.

Speaker 2: 15:24

Yeah, the load silk is on the shift rod on the Samsonis.

Speaker 1: 15:28

So, just again, for those who maybe aren't aware of how that mechanism works, can you talk through what happens during a shift and how the Emtron KV8 and the Samsonis work together?

Speaker 2: 15:40

Yeah, so that load cell is basically when you put load on the gear shifter, it tells the ECU that you're going to shift and it obviously works off a force and then it will cut the engine, will cut the torque off the engines so that the next gear goes in.

Speaker 1: 15:54

Essentially, with a dog engagement gearbox, we need some kind of torque reduction to actually allow the gear the current gear to disengage so that you can then select the next gear up. So when you're doing that, you can do this with a combination of. You could use a fuel card, an ignition card, a combination of both, or maybe the driver can actually lift on the throttle. Obviously not what you want to do drag racing In terms of the torque reduction strategy you're using. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Speaker 2: 16:19

Yeah, look, that's my brother's department. But when I say that it cuts the engine to go into the next gear, it's not just cutting the engine. There's obviously a whole heap of things going on at the same time.

Speaker 1: 16:32

In terms of the additional power that the car's got since it ran its 8.8, where do you sort of envisage it can get to? I mean, obviously it's not just a case of making more power and going faster. Traction becomes a really significant element there. But what do you think the car's actually capable of?

Speaker 2: 16:48

Yeah, well, look even on the old setup. We ran that 8.8 at a street meet and it was very slippery, so it was by far not a good run. I believe the car could have gone like maybe an 8.6, maybe even an 8.5, the way it was. You know, going to this power level, the car's got enough to run a 7, but the car's not set up to do that you know Important to sort of note here that it's not a dedicated drag car, this is a street car.

Speaker 2: 17:11

That's correct, you know. Yeah, so as much as the car's got all the gear to do it, it just doesn't have that last 10% to be set up for the drag strip.

Speaker 1: 17:23

It's been great to get some insight into the car. Dom, thanks for your time and look forward to actually seeing it run today. Cheers, thank you. If you enjoyed this podcast, please feel free to leave a review, on whatever platform you've chosen to listen to it on. It goes a long way to help us getting the word out there. All these conversations and much more are also available in full on our High Performance Academy YouTube channel, so make sure you subscribe. It's a one stop shop when it comes to going faster, stopping quicker and cornering better.