myholden.com

Chris's 6 cylinder vr executive

Chris sent us in some pics of his Holden VR series1 Commodore Executive. He has owned this car for 6 years, and tells us of the mods he has done over that time, his mods experiences would be useful for anyone looking to modify a VR commodore of their own. Chris has tried 2 sets of Lovells springs, SportsLows (1.75" drop) and SuperLows (2?"drop), and says the SportsLows work the best with standard travel struts, the SuperLows bottomed the outside rear on hard cornering. Chris also tried a few sets of tyres, and decided the best set he ran on the standard VR acclaim rims were Pirelli DragoP5000s 215/60 x15". Chris has tried several exhaust systems installed on his vr commodore, deciding the best one was a Finn-Ex mandrel bent 2?" system in which he had the resonator taken off and the last metre replaced with straight pipe for the level of volume he wanted. Chris says "I also had locally made Scorpion headers and a COME memcal chip fitted which when run on the dyno with and without, purely fuelled and mapped the ignition correctly taking a few tiny dips out of the power curve, it only added less than a horsepower in actual gain at peak." Powerwise Chris tells us "Finally power at the rear wheels was 160hp, another dyno I ran it on showed less but as we all should know, when quoting a dyno figure you have to say it was from a particular one as they vary. Final mod was a 3.7:1 ratio LSD installed by WA Diff Centre (highly recommended) over the standard 3.08:1 open diff. The results of all this was a best quarter time of 15.7 @ 136kmh (Kwinana Motorplex) over a standard time when new of 16.49 @ 124kmh (ModernMotor magazine). After running it down the quarter I was intersted to see how much quicker an even lower ratio would be worth in times." The engine speed at 100kmh increased to 2200rpm from 1850rpm with a 3.7:1. The VR had 136thou kms on it at the time of the above figures. A ratio box was fitted in line after the memcal computer to correct the speedo error, they had a few problems with electrical interference causing the speedo needle to jump at times, especially with a/c on. Thanks for all this information Chris, your holden looks tough and sounds pretty decent. Hopefully your mods experiences will be valuable to anyone look at doing up a vr commodore. Good luck with it in the future mate.