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Yet Another X - this one's a '57 Chevy

Accepted submission by at 2023-08-06 14:25:30 from the whats-old-is-new-again dept.
Hardware

In 1965, Popular Hot Rodding magazine bought a $250 '57 Chevy for a test bed, to try out various drag racing parts and tuning techniques. It was called Project X back then, here's a capsule history, https://www.motortrend.com/features/57-chevy-project-x-history/ [motortrend.com]

The only thing constant with X was change. The yellow tri-five has had everything from a 292 inline-six to small-blocks, big-blocks, mechanical fuel Injection, multibarrel carbs, cross-ram manifolds, superchargers, and even electronic fuel injection. The Project X 1957 Chevy has had it all over the decades. It was a car constantly reinventing itself to keep up with the latest trends in hot rodding.

Along the way it also appeared in the movie Hollywood Knights and has become arguably the most famous '57 Chevy ever. Nearly 20 years ago it want back to GM for a "makeover" including a modified Corvette front suspension, and since then it picked up another nickname, the "Million-Dollar Chevy."

Jump to the present, they recently converted it to BEV, using a new GM "crate motor", https://www.motortrend.com/features/57-chevy-ev-conversion-project-x-drag-strip-test/ [motortrend.com] including some major teething troubles getting the control software to deliver good power for a whole pass down the drag strip.

At this point our best 60-foot time was a solid 1.54 seconds. We were really happy with that time but at around 100 feet the system was dropping the voltage and killing our ET. The engineers kept working on the issue and eventually the car was waking up again around the 570-foot mark, but that loss in the middle was still hurting our overall time. The best analogy is an EFI car with fuel-control issues, but instead of running out of fuel, we were losing electricity flow.


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