The Bottom End
We'll be using Golden Eagle to do the sleeve work on our block with ductile iron sleeves that will be strutted; the strutted nature of these sleeves is very critical. As opposed to an open deck, it's about as close to a closed deck as you can get without any heating challenges. If you look about a quarter-inch down from the deck surface, you'll see these pillars that help stabilize the sleeves. At high rpm, you don't want your sleeves to move around, which can cause leakage between the head and gasket. A strutted sleeve will not only stabilize but it will keep the compression within the cylinder walls, in the engine where it belongs. A closed deck will just give you heating problems that are unnecessary. We'll have a 90mm bore, which is about as big as I would go on a NA street/strip application and will un-shroud the valves and help flow better to the combustion chamber. Pistons will be from Arias with ceramic barrier top and friction-reducing, molybased coating on the piston skirt. The ceramic coating on the piston dome helps to keep the heat inside the cylinder where it belongs, so that when the explosion occurs from combustion, you don't lose that heat to the surroundings. Engines are nothing but chemical-to-heat-to-mechanical energy converters. You want to create a chemical reaction that can produce heat, which can then be harnessed, and if kept in intact, you will be allowing it to do mechanical work to the piston itself, which then transfers to the crankshaft, which means you've done your job. Allowing heat to escape from the combustion chamber during those events hurts power.
The Top End
It's important that we utilize the right camshaft to orchestrate proper flow into the engine. Since we only have one cam, lobe separation is very, very critical. We don't have the luxury of a secondary cam to actuate the intake and exhaust cams separately to create a higher or lower overlap period. My experience with Web Cams will allow me to select the right grind to make high rpm power, amazing torque and continue to give us the reliability that we need. I can't give away the specs on the actual cam we're going to use for the Castrol Syntec Top Shop Challenge, but it is close to the Spec 3 cam that I have listed on my website. The cylinder head has been worked over to give us optimal flow.
Since we'll be able to use supplied 100-octane fuel and roughly 12:1 compression on our engine, we'll show that this ordinary underdog can come out on top. What's more important is that we'll make it reliable. You can make a lot of power on any engine but how long will it last? We've done a great job here at Bisimoto Engineering to make sure our engines not only produce power but stand the test of time. In my racing career, I haven't had a single engine failure (knock on wood) during any race weekend; most of my peers tend to break engines at almost every event. It's the same technology, attention to detail and meticulous nature we use when building engines that we'll apply here to the Castrol Syntec Top Shop Challenge.