November 17th, 2020 I loaded the kit onto the trailer and took it down to Emerald for a rolling road session. This is very nerve wracking as it is the first time the car is truly put under load and tested; honestly I was expecting the engine to blow up, wheels to fly off, or driveshafts to give way – it gave me sleepless nights.
Either way it needed to be done and so I booked and attended. There were a few issues that we fixed on the way, the team at Emerald were so helpful but also amazingly experienced.
The injectors I had were way too big and we were running at 0.5% making it very hard to get a smooth curve, I did have the other injectors with me so we swapped them back and were running at 3-4% on idle which was far more tunable. A few issues in the swap, dropped an m6 nut and feared I had dropped it into the inlet manifold/cylinder, turns out it landed outside and under the throttle body – phew! Also had some fuel squirting out when we swapped them back, turns out is was a injector o-ring that had split; Emerald had a spare one so swapped and fixed.
Now on to the runs; the first set up is to go through various static RPM’s and get a rough map then run some 4th gear full throttle pulls. Cooling was an issue here and after each run we had to let the engine cool before pulling again; a bit frustrating. This issue was compounded by the cooling in the Edge Devil V8 being split to both side pods but only having one large fan to blow air in!
We got there in the end and learnt a lot in the progress;
- Parasitic loss was excessive (a lot of rear toe in and very sticky tyres!)
- Throttle inlet is variable and was fixed at the mid point, this did not provide max power
- Cooling needs improving for full power runs
- Gear change went well and Dave enjoyed tuning this
- Engine did not blow up
- Wheels did not fall off….
