I bought this ’90 VNT Competition Package Shadow about three years ago. It’s very straight, nice interior and was close to being rust free. Since buying it, I fixed up a number of things including replacing the isolated rust spot and returning the drive train to mostly stock. It’s been for the most part just a driver. I’ve been thinking about what I was going to do with it and had considered selling it a few times, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
After finally registering for the Hot Rod Magazine Drag Week (been wanting to do this for years), I decided that this car would be perfect to use. It has a full interior, the suspension and fuel systems have been redone, it’s comfy and in nice shape. I have race cars, but none that I had any interest in driving for 1000+ street miles in 5 days without putting a lot of effort into. I thought about bringing my ’88 Shadow back to life for the event, but it’s very disassembled and is far from street trim at this point. It will be rebuilt, but not as a street car. That being the case, it was time to up the power in the ’90 Shadow (which will be fun long after Drag Week anyway).
Pictures below show the progress made so far. In the last couple of days, I backed it into the garage, pulled the drivetrain, converted the electronics to ’91 T3 and dropped in an already built T3/3.50 geared 568. I built this engine years ago but never used it after getting sucked into the low buck GRM Challenge events…it has .020 Wisecos, ARP’d bottom end, forged crank, decked block, etc. Top end is stock with the exeption of a ported exhaust manifold. For a turbo, I had a fresh 50 trim with an F3 exhaust wheel. I decided to do a bit of an experiment after liking the .48/Stage 3 combo so much on an 8v, I want to try it with the 16v…so I am. We’ll see how it works, but I suspect that it’s going to be a nice 3300-6500 torque curve. With a 3.50 gear in a relatively light car, I think it’s going to be a killer street set up that should be low 12 capable on pump gas. We'll see!
Next steps now that the wiring is done is to mount the FMIC, mock/tack the IC pipes, make sure everything fits as it should, then yank the drivetrain back out to clean/paint the engine bay. Once that’s done, it will be time to fire it up and move on to body/paint work.
I’ll post updates as they happen.
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Originally Posted by 168glhs1986
