I could just hear my dad, "Son, you don't buy a car loaded up with miles, that's when you sell it." Nonetheless, this Bird was in great shape and the LT1 accelerated the car like a rocket ship. It was the best car I looked at in over two dozen F-bodies, definitely a Wednesday car. Almost immediately, I was the proud owner of this 1994 Pontiac Firebird with 93,000 miles on the clock. It came with a 4L60E transmission and a 2.73 rear end.
It's easy to spark my fire, and this car is my daily driver so I knew better. I baselined the stocker at the drag strip, 14.45 at 95 mph on street tires. A little off the pace for an LT1 but not bad for the mileage. Before the next trip out I added all the "free-mods" including a home made airfoil and went 14.00 @ 99 mph.
I missed the 13s but not for long. A drag strip simulation showed the 2.73 gear was hindering performance, so I bought and installed a stock rear end complete with 3.73 gears and a girdle and broke two barriers: 14s and triple digit speeds, 13.72 at 100 mph. The car today gets 18 mpg with the 2.73 rear end and 15 mpg with the 3.73. It's takes a little over 3 hours to install the 2.73 rear end in just before winter. It's also nice to have a spare rear end considering the 7.5 is a weak link.
I make my own nitrous systems; it's cheap and entertaining. It's pretty easy to machine Teflon plungers compatible for use with nitrous. Two dollars buys 100 brass screws that I drill to size for use as jets. I made two bottles from old scuba tanks with new valves (not recommended you go this way, though!). The first system, a 50 hp shot, propelled the car to 12.93 at 108 mph. Hungry for more I jetted the nitrous to 100 hp, bolted on some hand-me-down 9-inch slicks with cheap steel rims, installed a 160 degree thermostat, and reprogrammed the ECM, 12.24 at 111 mph.
The stock transmission gave up on the street shortly after the 12.24 pass. I jumped on the opportunity to install a TH350; it is lighter and geared more evenly to keep the engine in the desired rpm range. The result is quarter-mile times several tenths quicker. Everything required for the installation is fabricated, including a slap shifter from the stock unit and remounting the torque arm onto the crossmember rather than the transmission housing. A good transmission allowed more spray, so the 150 hp jets were installed, and it ran 11.52 at 116 mph.
This old stocker was getting seriously fast, so more performance alterations were made: carpet, seats, hood modifications, a second nitrous stage, and a Hooker Aero Chamber muffler with a "modular" exhaust. The carpet and seats lighten up the car. One-hundred bucks for new carpet, no way; the $30 in carpet is from the Zone, $2 needle and thread courtesy of Wal-Mart. I often tell people, "there probably isn't a manufacturing process known to man that's not used on some car somewhere." A great place to shave weight and save money is by removing the under hood reinforcement, latch, and latch brace. Don't just drill holes, cut it away and use pins to replace the latching equipment. A good fiberglass hood is $450, for 8 bucks you can keep the cool stock looks, avoid painting a new hood, and have a real nice pair of aviation snips at the end of the job. The additional nitrous (about 40 hp) speaks for itself in performance terms. The addition of the muffler and modular exhaust make it easy to drop the entire system at the track. This reduces the race weight and the exhaust backpressure, two things that free up power to go faster. I drop the entire system, leaving only the stock exhaust manifolds and the stock "Y" pipe. After ironing out solenoid trouble on the 11.13 pass, the Indian raised the tomahawk, exhaled a puff of smoke, and built excitement all the way down the quarter mile, stopping the clocks at 11.003 at 120 mph! Ten second personal goal missed by that much. The 1.50 sixty-foot is a relaxed effort with no purge and long nitrous lines as the solenoids are located under the seat.