Never before in history has there been so many high-performance parts for automobiles.  Things for brakes, for handling, for the engine, for the transmission, you name it, it’s out there. And that poses a problem.  How do you determine which parts go together best to accomplish whatever it is that you want to get out of your particular vehicle? Like in this one catalog, there are probably over a hundred different styles of cylinder heads.  And there are many, many camshafts, different styles of lifters and pistons and induction systems and so on.

If you’re going to do drag racing, well, there are all kinds of different things available there.  Or, if you’re doing road racing, again, all kinds of variables, so you have to be able to make a decision as to what you’re going to buy and what you’re going to get as a result of that.

Well, there is something that is brand new that I think you’ll be impressed with.  This particular one, I have it loaded here on the screen, this is called Dyno Sim.  Now, it’s available in three versions: Dyno Sim, which is a dynamometer simulation for engine building; Fast Lap Sim, which is for closed-circuit racing, and Drag Sim for drag racing. Now, this is very ingenious.

What you do is you put into the program the engine, in this case because we’re using the Dyno Sim.  We devise the engine Ð the make, the size, and all of that Ð and then we can go down through the program and we can change the different parts.

Like right now, we have this set up so that at 6500 RPM, we have 647 crankshaft horsepower out of this engine.  So, if we want to change something here, we can change to just plain gasoline instead of nitrous, and at the same RPM, now we have 547.  And it will give us a number of different readouts. We can have graphs like you would see on the dynamometer printout, we can have tables, all kinds of different things in this, and it’s instantaneous.

Expect to pay $149 for each one of these, but expect to get paid back three, four, five,10 times that amount in taking the guesswork out of designing and building your engine or your car.

If you have a question or comment, write to me.  The address is MotorWeek, Owings Mills, MD, 21117.