I'm building a stage 2 SE motor for a street strip car. The goal is 11.50's (though more would be alright). Which headers would you run with this combination: 464 ported stage 2 SE heads 10.8:1 compression TA296-08H10 cam (243, 247, 110 LC) SP1 850 Holley This car will see street and strip time, and the roads are rough around my house. The extra ground clearance would be nice, but I don't want to kill all the stage2 flow potential. A little loss would be worth it to me. What do you think?
I'd go for the full length headers. If your going to invest that much money you might as well get the most power out of it.
You can go, "Headers by Ed", they are costly but perfect. Try the "several piece" type, two tubes to the outside of the frame rails and two inside. This allows you to have Stage II headers installed after the engine is in the car. This would require a slightly mod of the inner fender wheels, if that mod is not a problem. Otherwise, tell him all tubes on the inside. If you go with other types, at least several others require the tubes to be in place before stabing the engine in.
Shorties are awesome, you can make up the lost h.p. with an x-pipe. Never had a set of full length headers that I liked, dragging and leaking at the collector flanges... if you need that last 5hp that bad spend a couple more bucks on porting.
I believe Jim Weise has done dyno test with the various exghaust combinations available. He said the shorties give up about 8 Hp and 10 torque average across the board. Not that much since you will probaly have somewhere between 525 to 550 Hp to start out with.
Well, Mr. Zerucha (Staged70Lark) was kind enough to help me out with a set of large tube headers that come apart to make it easier to get them in the car. I don't know if they're going to work with muffers, but I guess we'll see!
