My Pride and Joy -- 1993 Formula Firebird

My favorite hobby is tinkering with my car.  It's a 1993 Pontiac Formula Firebird.   I ordered it in March of 1993 with all the bells and whistles except leather and T-tops.  The car came from the factory with the LT1 engine rated at 275 HP and 325 ft-lbs of torque at the crankshaft, 6-speed transmission and a host of other goodies.  However, that has since changed.  Read on...

I haven't been as diligent as some people about taking pictures of the before and after modifications, but here are a few of what I have.

Here's what you do with old tires!  :-)  

3/4 frontal.  This is after the Eibach springs and Bilsteins were installed.  The car sits loooww... and it really corners now!  Driving is 10 times more fun now.  The only drawback was the cat-back intermediate pipe had to be bent and raised to keep it from dragging.

This is the side of the car I like to show to my buddy Paul and any unsuspecting  cars.  You can see the tips of the Borla adjustable exhaust that I installed.

Obviously, a shot of the very clean engine compartment.  There's 80k miles on that motor.  The red bar is a Hotchkis shock tower brace that made an amazing improvement in handling. Also visible is the MTI intake tube and MSD-6AL ignition box on the right side of the image.

This is a close-up of the MTI and MSD-6AL.  The MSD also required a large capacitor to be installed inline with the power and ground wires.  This prevented the MSD ignition noise from getting into the aftermarket stereo I installed.  It also stabilizes the power input.

A nice shot of the 17 x 8.5" ROH ZR6 wheels shod with 275-40ZR-17 B.F. Goodrich Comp TAs.

This uninteresting shot is the amplifire box I built for my stereo amps.  It is made of 1" plywood, painted flat black and covered with felt carpet to match the car's interior.  The box is bolted to the floor pan using machine screws and NutZerts.  If it looks plain and uninteresting, good!  That means I did the job right.

Inside the amp box is this array of amps.   From left to right is the Kenwood 75W/ channel driving the rear Polk speakers.   The black box next to it is a Sherwood crossover.  The small silver amp is a Kenwood 35W/ channel for the front Kenwood speakers.  The blue amp on the right is a Crutchfield 50W/ channel bridged to mono @ 100W driving a 10" Bazooka basstube crossed at 150Hz.

On May 16, 1998 I was driving home and struck a deer.  I took some pictures of the damage.

Here's some images in the driveway of the repair work after my encounter with the deer.

Click here for 800x600 resolution version.

Upgrades:

Brakes

Suspension

Car Modifications:

After the first round of modifications, I had the car power output measured on a Dynojet dynometer.  I had installed theTPIS™ AFPR, spark plug wires, airfoil, 160 thermostat, and open element air filter.  The largest difference was made with the AFPR.  I could tell by the seat-of-the-pants method of power measurement.  The car felt at least 10 HP stronger.  It is probably the best mod you can do for the money.  You can see the results. 

Later on, I installed the adjustable Borla cat back, MTI intake tube with a K&N filter, Bosch plugs, Taylor wires, Accel coil, MSD-6AL and then made another run on the dyno to see the effects of the modifications.  The results of the second run show the improvement.

The next round of mods will be to install a set of Crane Gold 1.6 roller rockers.  After that, I want headers, y-pipe, heads, cam, throttle body, and maybe an engine rebuild.

Drag strip timeslips

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