The Mighty V8

​The rise of the V8

So far we talked about the Mad Max movies, the cars, and a little bit of DIY vehicle bulletproofing. Today it's time to talk about the power source of the beast, the mighty V8!

This is one of our beloved naturally aspirated V8 AJ28 engines, right before we put the timing belt on. In its current state it provides us a hefty 281 horsepowers with 389 Nm torque, which is more than adequate for driving around town, however if we want to survive the apocalypse, we have to squeeze even more out of it.

Supercharged, turbo, or naturally aspirated V8?

We want to gain a lot more power from that V8, so naturally as anyone who wants to gain a lot of power easily, we turn to the magical world of turbo/superchargers. Now at this point in time we haven't sat down to sift through the available turbos and superchargers for our price range and the adequate one for the engine itself, but we have plenty of opportunities to choose from, thanks to eBay and it's incredibly cheap turbo and supercharger kits. The prospect of installing a supercharger which would then be connected to the AC to allow us to turn it on and off during driving (like in the original movies) sounds very good as well, however they generally tend to give less power compared to turbochargers. Additionally it's worth looking into wether it's worth it to simply buy an AJ33S 4.2 liter supercharged engine producing 390 horsepowers with 541 Nm torque to get a more reliable boost in power instead of tweaking this one with dodgy aftermarket eBay parts. For now we're just throwing ideas in the pot, and the decision will come when we get to the actual stage where we can install something like that.

Another mad idea we had was to install a nitro system. Now as this will be more of a showcar than anything else, we don't have to be bothered by the extremely restrictive Hungarian laws regarding car modification, so we can go ahead and do it, although refueling the nitro would be rather hard after the collapse of civilisation, but we surely could find a way.

Additionally, there are minor, more obvious things we're planning on doing, such as a cold air intake, and to get that sweet low V8 sound out of it along with an extra few horsepowers, it will recieve a nice and wide straight pipe exhaust. ;)