Classic Car Gallery

Friday, August 7, 2009

Texas tuner developing turbocharged V6 Camaro to take on GT-R's 'Ring record

2010 Chevrolet Camaro RS

Must. Beat. Godzilla. For some reason. Here's the skinny. A tuner company called East Texas Muscle Cars is fitting a couple of turbos to a 2010 V6 Camaro in order to "beat" the 'Ring time laid down by none other than the Nissan GT-R. That leaves us with two questions then: how and why?

Lots of folks are going to buy V6 Camaros, grok the 304 hp V6, scratch their heads and say, "More power." In other words, there's a market. ETMC will rip the guts come out of the 3.6-liter LLT and throw in forged rods, crank and pistons. And then, of course, you get the two Squires Turbo Systems turbos. These are remote-mounted turbos that bolt up under the car near the exhaust. With such a system, you're basically trading a bit of lag for increased cooling and no need to mess around with new headers. East Texas thinks they can wring 500 horses out of the system no problem.

Then there's the matter of dealing with the stock Camaro's "tremendous understeer and cradle walk." That's pretty necessary if you want to do battle with a R35, which neither understeers nor cradle walks nor really does anything bad or sloppy. East Texas Muscle Cars will be addressing those issues via harder bushings and Pedders coil-overs, along with a Baer big brake kit and lightweight forged 20-inch wheels.

Then there's the question: Why? Why go after Godzilla, such a high profile target? Unless you're building Clubber Lang, why call out Rocky? Publicity, obviously. Would we even be writing about a bolt-on turbo kit for a V6 Camaro unless they publicly challenged one of the production car 'Ring masters? Probably not. But there is one part of their scheme that we do like. Once the Camaro is finished, ETMC will be flying it and a friend's stock GT-R out to Germany to run 'em both simultaneously. Since that's the case, no need to even mention the inherent fallacy of Nurburgring lap records.

[Source: Inside Line]

Production Aston Martin Rapide to debut in Frankfurt

F1 Live Streaming

Unlike recent auto expos, the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show is going to have some fantastic jewelry on display -- the Ferrari 458 Italia, Porsche's revised 911 Turbo, the MX-5 Superlight, the list goes on and on. Aston Martin has also confirmed that three years after the Rapide concept stole the show in Detroit, the production version will join the beer-and-sausage fest in Germany.

The Rapide's price has been given at £110,000 in the U.K.. It's supposedly 40 horsepower down on the Vantage V12 -- 470 hp versus 510 hp -- but if that price is right, the Rapide costs £25,000 less than the Vantage V12. While we're fans of the brutish Vantage, that's enough change for us to notice. So we'll simply have to put the two side-by-side in Frankfurt to compare...

[Source: Channel4]