High-RPM EFI Intakes Test: Spin the Throttle

Rick’s red coupe is an...        read full caption Rick’s red coupe is an old workhorse. Since its Clean Power days when Rick ran in emissions legal trim, this car has seen a number of wild combinations and a nearly uncountable number of dyno pulls. During our latest series of high-rpm, naturally aspirated testing, the car shed its supercharged past for an 8,000-rpm D.S.S. Sportsman Renegade short-block fitted with an AFM N113 camshaft and Stage V–ported Trick Flow Twisted Wedge cylinder heads.

Wouldn’t you like to...        read full caption Wouldn’t you like to have a trunk full of intakes like this? You would if you wanted to run roughshod past the factory 6,250-rpm rev limiter all the way up to 7,750 rpm. Keep in mind that these aren’t out-of-the-box intakes, however. Each intake has received Stage II port work in at least the lower intake (the boxes can’t really be ported) and has had the throttle body-openings expanded to 90 mm if necessary. Such port work will set you back $425-$475 (the additional cost is for cutting and welding intakes such as the Trick Flow R). It’s also worth noting all the upper-only, box-style intakes were run on the same lower—a Trick Flow R lower, which sells for $250 before porting.

If you tuned in last month, you saw us follow along as Rick Anderson of Anderson Ford Motorsport coupled a lightweight D.S.S. 347 with one of his AFM Hydraulic Roller High Rev series camshafts to create an 8,000-rpm-capable, 458hp, fuel-injected small-block (“Natural High,” Oct. ’02 p. 55). If you didn’t tune in last month—well, shame on you (our subscrip- tions are cheap, you know). In last month’s issue, we detailed many of the lightweight internals Rick optioned for his D.S.S. Sportsman Renegade short-block, as well as the specs of the AFM N113 camshaft and the cylinder-head porting. Then we dyno’d the combination with an Edelbrock Victor 5.0 intake manifold with the aforementioned impressive results.

In any case, it was a trick engine (for more on the complete combo, check out the 5.0 Tech Specs sidebar). With such rpm capability, we thought there might be a little power lurking in the intake manifold, so we resolved to try as many of the high-rpm EFI intakes as we could in a back-to-back dyno test. We gathered up some of the most aggressive EFI intake manifolds on the planet: Edelbrock’s Victor 5.0, Probe Industries’ EFI Spyder, Reichard Racing’s Billet Upper, Trick Flow’s R-series, Trick Flow’s prototype box upper, and Vortech’s Mondo Box. With five intakes in his trunk and one under the hood, Rick headed back to one of his favorite places, the Dynojet building onsite at AFM. During the course of three days, Rick swapped the intake manifolds and dyno’d each with the same settings in his trusty Programmable Management System, taking great care to make each pull at the same engine temperature for consistency. As deadlines approach, Rick usually regrets agreeing to test a pile of hardware for us, but when it’s over he’s usually glad he did it because he learned something (and if he learned something, we can all learn something). And this test was no different. Rick had questioned whether the new generation of simple box intakes could perform as well as today’s modern short-runner designs, and as it turns out, they can.

Horse Sense: If you’re new on the scene, you might be wondering what kind of tubing is attached to the throttle body in all our photos. Well, that’s one of AFM’s Naturally Aspirated Power Pipes. That’s right—they’re not just for blowers anymore. These large-diameter tubes are designed to place the mass air meter in the inner fender and provide an unfettered path for inlet air, which usually results in several more horsepower to the rear wheels of your Mustang.