Tomorrow morning at 3:45am I&#
Tomorrow morning at 3:45am I'll be getting on a bus to Denver. Another bus ride will put me into Boulder. There, at Dave Helm's Scuderia Rampante shop, sits the fastest and most powerful 550 in the world - mine!- the only one with a completely tuned exhaust system, consisting of a pair of HYPERFLOW's prototype catalytic convertors (only 3-5% less efficient that straight pipes and able to meet emission standards testing worldwide) and HYPERFLOW's prototype X-pipe, made unlike any other x-pipe in the world (sorry, but all the details are to be described in an upcoming article for PILOTA magazine).
The car now has so much torque, it can pull tree stumps...all the way to 7,000 rpm- compared to the torque plateau that used to hit at 5,000rpm.
In the midrange of rpm, the pull is like the car weighs 800pounds less (ie 40-50hp more)!
And the sound is incredible: Individual cylinder pulsing, as each pulse creates a tuned, partial vacuum to extract the next pulse. And the right rear tire is being eaten alive from the power.
Nuts with "Tubi" nonsense. Changing mufflers doesn't do anything (for about the same price as this conversion will retail for) but make NOISE!!!!
This makes enough noise (with Quicksilver mufflers that I already had) people's teeth fillings fly out of their mouth!
But- unlike noisy "look at me" mufflers- there is ALSO a measurable performance increase unlike anything ever seen in a stock 550! I can eat a 575's lunch in any gear. And until their turbos spooled up, I'd give any F-40 a run to 60mph!
I'll have a photo or two from tomorrow to share- but not of the exhaust.
The Helms' Girls of Scuderia Rampante have yellow rain slickers and we're doing photos by the yellow Maranello! In a month, the Scuderia will do a custom cam timing to maximize the torque and horsepower curves from this new baseline!
The new pre-flight:
ASR to off (otherwise, the brakes are shuddering in a vain attempt to keep the wheels from spinning and it's wearing out the brakes!!!) Oil temp and pressure good. Water temp good. Warm up transaxle for a few blocks and ....GO!!!!!!!!!!
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