All the time my Morris Minor was laid up in storage in places I couldn't get to conveniently, which was the greater part of the time I owned it, I was wracking my brain over how to swap in a Subaru EJ25 flat-four. It seems a natural on the face of it: the engine is just about the same size and shape as the Minor's engine bay, with about ½" clearance all round. But it was one thing after another: the exhaust ports wanted to be where the Minor's chassis legs were; the starter motor wanted to go straight through the Minor's steering rack; and the oil pan wanted to go several inches into the road. Everything pointed to moving the engine higher in the car, but only two years after having to sell the car did I figure out how to make the steering work with that. But all that's besides the point. The idea was to decomputerize the EJ25 entirely, and hopefully get rid of or at least disguise a lot of the plastic bits. The plan was to use sohc heads, probably off an EJ22, in order to apply an aircraft-engine trick my extensive researches had revealed. The aircraft people run a Ford CVH distributor off the back of the right-hand camshaft for ignition redundancy. I was going to do that as the sole ignition. The necessary distributor is sitting here on the shelf — which is about as close as I got. It was always going to have a pair of 1¾" SUs, which would have meant a VW-style tubular intake, with a taller arch than the stock piece to prevent fuel ponding. My daydreams invariably went to blow-through turbocharging, for which a pair of HIF44s would have been ideal. And, of course, the block, heads, and various other bits would have been painted MOWOG green. That's just by way of background. I'd really like to see other examples of this. I seem to recall mention of carbs run on Toyota 2UZ-FE V8s for certain New Zealand racing series. Perhaps @Kerrynzl knows something about that?
NZ Stock Car racing [superstocks] have a 4 litre limit and single 4 barrel carb , so they rev the shit out of them. 10,000 rpm They need special cams x 4 plus 32 x oversized valves and valve springs and retainers. 400hp from these is cheap but 500 hp is exponentially more expensive Toyota V8's are also a very common swap into Hi-Lux 4x4's and Landcruisers in NZ [they machine a plate for the Iron case trans to the V8 Bellhousing and use a hydraulic throwout bearing]
Do they disable the VVT? What ignition do they use? It seems some versions have something much like distributors incorporated into the cam sprockets: though I suspect without any provision for centrifugal or vacuum advance. That is ugly, but I suspect that the main castings can add up to quite a pretty engine.
The cams are custom grinds and VVT locked. [Kelford Cams in NZ] The valve springs and retainers are the same as Lotus Cortina / Kent X-Flow race engines with standard Toyota buckets and shims. Usually the cheaper race engines run stock bottom end with ARP rod bolts.[ARP LS1 Chevy Rod Bolts] Some racers use crank trigger ignition and no vacuum advance etc for racing.[They use common Holden /Buick V6 coil packs because they're cheap] And some use stock cam driven distributors. The engines are as tough as nails with steel crank and 6-bolt mains etc [good for 8000 rpm standard] It is common to get 5 seasons racing from a stock bottom end engine. If the engine has forged pistons, aftermarket rods, dry sump, stainless valves with different cam followers etc a 10500 rpm redline is normal . Pair that with 180° Headers and it will scream like a Formula 1 engine [in a dirt track car ] Here's a Toyota Stock car engine plagiarised from the interwebs
I had a dry sump system in my Corvette that cost more than my first house [what a bargain] A Godzilla engine doesn't have provisions for a Dizzy , so you're stuck with crank trigger ignition and intakes are as rare as "rocking-horse shit" so it would be easier with EFI and Crank trigger
I have a Ford turbo 2.3 L (~1987; EFI) that I had running on propane. That's an engine that was not ~born EFI. I'm considering EFI and E-85 with a small ("Errrr") 3 or 4-cylinder ~Geo Metro engine. (Pete Puma reference)
Being a pushrod engine, there aren't convenient ends of cams to run a distributor off. The water pump shields the front of the cam, and the flywheel shields the back. If your build is intrusive enough to relocate the water pump, you could introduce an oil seal and run a distributor off the nose of the crank. That would obviously make the engine longer. And if you're going there, fabricating an intake manifold wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility. You'd also be beyond the realm of simple. Me, I like stubborn instead!
A company called Late Model Engines makes a front cover that mounts any old Chevy distributor, with their own oil pump and there are at least 2 Holley 4150 flange intakes out there.
I nearly got a lifetime ban from the FIA for fuel tampering. But got saved by a loophole in the rulebooks. I reclassified the logbook on my Cortina as "Historic" which had provisions for Alcohol and Alcohol blends. The purpose for this provision was for historic GP and Indy cars , not somebody with a "thinner interpretation of the rulebook" @Mikko_ I built a "Crossie" to run on Alky blends [this was a cheap grenade engine, in the days when I lacked "mechanical sympathy"] Apart from stoichiometric ratios, the real secret was Compression. I used 1300 x-flow pistons with the crowns shaved so the bowls were a lot smaller [the valve pockets got dangerously close to the top ring land] The block was decked almost 200 thou [5mm] so the pistons were 5 thou above deck. The decking caused real drama with valve train geometry A cam grind dropped the lifters down a bit, but we also needed longer valves [from Nissan L 18] and spacers under the pedestals for the rocker shaft. [because I was too cheap for shorter pushrods] The electronic ignition was a Mazda B5 dizzy that we machined the body in a lathe [the Ford Dizzy gear was identical to the Mazda shaft only requiring a hole for a roll-pin] This was back when I could get free engines from a dumpster/skip. So driving it at extreme RPM was fun . It went like a scolded cat! Fun days !!!!!! edit: I was too cheap to pay $800+ for Ford Motorsport 5:1 gears, so I picked up a Nissan C20 van diff head and machined a gasket thin "lipped spacer" to centralize it in the Ford housing. Then I re-drilled the housing for splined studs [from behind]. I used the Cortina axles and end spiders [located by a spacer] and welded them locked. It cost me $50 for a 4.975:1 rear Painted Ford Blue and nobody ever noticed [Ford diff heads had 3 ribs per side]
The Jalopy Journal
