Well... seeing as I've had the car for a few years now, I thought it was worth making one of these threads that I can keep updated with new happenings..
So, I bought the car back in late 2004, and started fiddling almost immediately.... (typical) The car is a 1996 Saleen S281, number 96-005 and one of only 2 Saleen Coupes ever made in "tangerine clearcoat". The car was first owned by Jon Walker of Saleen-Allen Racelab in Irvine CA. He worked in development as far as I can find out. The blower installed on the car was designed for a 302 fox body but was fettled to fit the brand new modular motor that was installed in the mustang in 1996!! The blower was a prototype fitment by Saleen to decide on what blowers to install in the later S281-SC cars
Here's the car when I first got it home...
and here is the big box of stuff that I ordered to fit.. lower control arm, matching uppers, off road h pipe, steeda clutch gear, sct pro racer pack (which allows me to map the ecu!!) and a few other little bits...
So with that lot installed (along with the saleen prototype blower already on there)
i drove around with no issues, at the track, on the street, everything was kushty
That was until I installed the methanol injection kit....
This didn't cause any problem as such, just showed a weakness in the Saleen blower hosing. This kept blowering off under closed throttle (at 5k plus) as the blower became more efficient and was now producing more boost.
This continual mapping and methanol injection fiddling became the subject for my uni dissertation (and netted me a double first). I am writting an article for RaceCar Engineering on the methanol system at the moment too...
So, after ages of fiddling with the original saleen blower I decided to go bigger... obviously. After much research I ordered a Paxton Novi 2000. This is the big one, it'll do 35psi if you ask it nicely and will quite happily support over 1000hp motors, so it'd do for mine... here's where the fun started....
The blower on the car origianlly was installed by Saleen just after the car was built and it was done fairly well. It was obvious once I started removing it though, that it was never designed for this motor. The blower in a fox body bay sits in an area of space that just doesnt exist on an sn95. A large hole was cut in the inner fender for the blower to sit in...
After removing ALL of the old blower setup... and there was a lot of it, believe me... I made a new inner wind frome zintec steal and sprayed it to match the engine bay (I'll have to get a pic of that)...
I then started the novi2000 blower install
(these were when i was test fitting hence the inner fender still has the hole)
you can see that the blower is way bigger than the old one... heres a shot of the novi 2000 alone..
compared to the older blower:
So.. in being bigger and better, this caused 2 other problems...
radiator getting in the way on the inlet...
air con. lines just plain in the way..... these were adjusted out of the way...
the elbow needed a lot of fiddling to fit though... mainly to the rad support and fan shroud..
this allowed the elbow to fit all hunkey-dorey...
unfortunately, this is where I stopped taking pictures of each step and just tried to get it finished.... I'm going to get some more pictures tomorrow as it should be out of the garage in the first time in 6 months !!! wooohoooooooooooooooooooo I'm SO looking forward to it....
wow..... long first post
