💬 Mighty Car Mods Cresta Secrets of a 9-sec Sleeper Technically Speaking

Hi and welcome to another episode of Haltech's Technically Speaking. Today we're here with the Mighty Car Mods Ford-powered Toyota Cresta. For those of you who don't recognize the car, this is a 1985-ish Toyota Cresta. It's one of the cars that the guys from Mighty Car Mods purchased. They bought it in Japan, they've then bought it over to Australia and they've finished one of their projects 10 seconds in 10 days. So this car was actually all built in 10 days. In order to achieve their target of a 10-second pass, the guys have fitted the mighty Ford Falcon Barra inline-six 4.0-litre engine, an automatic transmission, a full custom rear end, a big fuel system. So look, there's so much in this car, let's just start at the front and work our way back. It's not hard to see why people are so impressed with the Barra engine. It's made by Ford for the Australian market. It's a 4.0-litre twin-cam, four-valve per cylinder engine, which standard is equipped to make huge power. These engines are available in naturally aspirated, LPG and turbocharged. Interestingly enough, in the Ford territory, they're actually equipped with a four-wheel drive gearbox. The early series of the Ford Barra engine in our aftermarket world have been known to make up to around 350 kilowatts of the wheels, whereas the later model engines have been known to make up to and exceed 500 kilowatts of the wheels on pretty much the standard rotating assembly. Now, the things that we do need to change that are common to change on these are the valve springs, as well as the oil pump gears. Other than that, she's ready to go. Let's start at the air filter where this adventure begins. First, the air comes in through our Garrett GTW3884 turbocharger. It's got a 76-millimetre inducer and it's got a 132-split-pulse rehousing. Now, this turbocharger will compress the air. It'll go in through our custom-made aluminium intercooler pipe, through our black front-mounted intercooler, up through our factory Ford FG electronic throttle body. That's a dead standard throttle body. Hasn't been bored out, nothing like that. Our ECU controls the electronic throttle body, so opens and closes it. The air comes straight in through our custom inlet manifold, through our billet inlet runners, into the engine. On our intake pipe, we've also got a blower valve that's going to open when the throttle blade shuts. What this is going to do, it's going to bleed off the excess air. It's going to stop our turbocharger from cavitating, so it's going to give us less turbocharger lag between gears. In the engine bay part of the fuel system, we've got our adjustable fuel pressure regulator set to 45 pounds. What that means is that we've taken the vacuum reference off the regulator, we've adjusted the screw up and down, until our fuel gauge has showed us 45 pounds of fuel pressure. When we attach our vacuum and boost source back to the fuel pressure regulator, it's going to allow this fuel pressure regulator to regulate the fuel pressure. What's going to happen is, if we put 10 pounds of boost pressure into the inlet manifold, it's also going to put 10 pounds of pressure onto our fuel pressure regulator, rising the fuel pressure by 10 pounds. With 10 pounds of boost, we'll end up with 55 pounds of fuel pressure. Likewise, if it pulls vacuum, the fuel pressure will get lower. This is because the pressure across the injector is changing, because we've got pressure on one side of the injector, which is boost pressure, and we've got fuel pressure going into the top of the injector. In order to keep that pressure ratio the same, we need our fuel pressure to change based on manifold pressure. Moving down, we've got six Deutschwerks 1500cc injectors that are putting E85, or ethanol fuel, straight into the engine. Moving towards the centre of the engine, you can see that it's a factory red paint. That's the colour they are in the cars, they're either red or blue. It's a factory cover over the stock coil, so we haven't changed the coils in this car, and we also haven't changed the wiring harness, believe it or not. The harness in this is fairly neat and tidy, so we've actually chosen to cut the connectors, or the factory Ford connectors, off the loom inside the car, and re-pin into the Haltech ECU. This was done because it saves a lot of time, and the factory harness is quite nice anyway. Moving over to the exhaust side of the engine, we've got a custom exhaust manifold that feeds the exhaust gases up into the exhaust housing of the turbocharger we've already spoken about. It's got a 4-inch dump pipe, which is the exhaust that goes out the back of the car, and it's also got an external wastegate that bleeds off excess pressure before the turbine housing, so we've got electronic boost control from our ECU. Next up, let's take a look in the back and see where all this fuel comes from. One of the most important things in a high horsepower build is the fuel system. You want to make sure you've got enough fuel at the fuel rail, whenever the engine needs it, to make sure that things don't lean out and go pear-shaped. In order to make sure this engine doesn't drop fuel pressure, the guys have fitted three Deutschwerks 350 litre an hour fuel pumps. So they're mounted in this custom fuel cell, which is really, really nice. So what it's got up the top, it's got our power lugs, so all three pumps are actually running at the same time, because this is a drag car. If this was a street car, you might want to stage the pumps, so the more load on the engine, the more pump you would be turning on. Each pump is powered by its own relay and its own fuse, because running three of these pumps takes a serious amount of current. Looking at the hosing connections on the fuel tank, we've got our fuel feed, which is the high pressure that comes out of the three fuel pumps, through our check valve or our one-way valve, down through a fuel filter, then through the floor and out into the fuel rail. It goes through the fuel rail, goes out some injectors, but the remaining fuel goes through our fuel pressure regulator and then comes all the way back down the car through our fuel return line and straight back into the tank. We've also got our two breathers, just so that excess pressure doesn't build up in the fuel tank. One other thing you're going to notice out the back here is the parachute. So in Australia, our ANDRA, or drag racing rules, tells us that over 140 miles an hour on a quarter mile, you're going to need a parachute to stop, as well as the brakes that are normally fitted to the car. This parachute is mounted into the roll cage that's in the car, so this is really well set up so that we've got bars that protect the driver, obviously to come down into the chassis rails of the car, and then they come around and actually house the parachute as well, so it makes it a really nice compact unit. One of the great things about it, when you're not drag racing, you can pull it out sometimes, if you're lucky, and it's really tight, but you can get it out, and then you can drive to the shops. Okay, we've seen the engine bay, we've seen the trunk or the boot, let's jump inside and have a look at the brains of the operation. Now we've moved inside to the Sea of Marone, which the designers from the mid-80s seem to be really fond of. We've got our full roll cage, which has got our harness mount behind us for both the passenger and the driver. We've got our parachute handle right here, so that we can pull that to pull our parachutes if we're going over 140 mile an hour in our quarter mile. We've got an IQ3 street dash, and we've got our billet shifter, which is really nice. One of the downsides of using the factory Ford Falcon wiring harness in this build, is that we didn't have the freedom to move the engine management system anywhere. It was dictated by the length of the harness, which just happens to mount up under the dash. So we've got our ECU and our ignition module mounted straight up under the dash, and then we've got our communications cables just hanging straight out the side of the shifter to make it nice and easy to access. The Haltech ECU we've chosen to use for this project is the Elite 2500T. And the reason we've used an Elite 2500T, is the T is Advanced Torque Management. So in this car, we're actually going to set it up so that the engine management is going to control the engine's torque or power, in order to make sure that we get the most traction and we get the most consistent quarter mile runs every single time. In this application, an Elite 2500 is going to allow us to control the power of the engine using a rotary trim, something like this, in order to control our boost and our throttle opening angle, because it's an electronic throttle. So what we do in this application is set up a driveshaft RPM target curve versus our race time. This means that as we accelerate off the line in a drag race, we've got plotted out points that we want our driveshaft to meet. If it doesn't meet these points, that means that we've either overpowered the track and our driveshaft is spinning too fast. In that case, we'll limit the engine power by either reducing the electronic throttle or dropping some spark events so that the engine will actually misfire and lose power, or we'll lower the boost pressure. So if we're not meeting our driveshaft curve, that means that we're not making enough power. So we can either increase our boost pressure or add our ignition timing back in to our pre-programmed ignition map. This way, we'll always be riding our ignition curve, meaning we're not going above or below our pre-programmed curve, and we'll always get our perfect pass. But like everything with cars and drag racing, nothing's perfect. So if you set up your driveshaft RPM target curve, then you're lined up in your staging lanes and you've noticed that track's got a little bit better or a little bit worse. So don't worry. We've got these rotary switches that allow us to choose between several different pre-programmed driveshaft curves. The same switch can also adjust our throttle angle and our boost pressure. So by using this switch, we can adjust the engine power depending on the track conditions, which will allow us to make the perfect pass no matter what time of day, no matter what track, no matter what place. Well, that's it for today. As always, thanks very much for watching. Seems like there's only one more thing to do. I'm sure you want to hear a nine-second battery engine. So let's start it up.