I have been trying to decide between LT's and Shorties for a while now and have decided I want to turbo the car later down the road. The only thing that could sway that decision is seeing what the new Edelbrock and Techo superchargers do. I want to see what the suprchargers do on low boost. If they don't live up to what's being advertised, I will just stick with a turbo system. I was wondering if anyone uses Shorty headers like the BBK's with their turbo system and if you noticed a difference in spooling or power production. I don't think I have ever seen anyone run anything other then the stock manifolds. Post pics and your comments if you got any.

 

Some systems come with turbo headers. Personally i would have some custom headers made for it. I guess im mainly thinking of twin kits but i think my opinion would remain for a single

 

I have shorties with a single and I have no idea if it's benificial or not. I know that taking the cats out helped spool it up but who knows.

I love the turbo, I like the power it makes, but if I were to do it all over again I would have gotten the big KB.

The reason is for tuning. There are alot of people out there that can tune S197s with blowers, nitrous and NA. But turbo cars are an animal all of their own.

Unless you have someone near you who can tune on your car as needed, get a supercharger. I'm not talking just any tuner. Someone who actually knows how to do it.

Just my opinion.

 

Well I will have Justin at VMP tune it for me since he's really close to me. If I were to go with the big KB, I would need a bigger pulley on it to lower the boost and detune it until the motor was built. With a turbo it's simple to change boost with a boost controller and I just like the aspects of a turbo'd car. Thanks for the imput with the headers. As is, I'm not driving around with cats so that won't be a problem. I think I will end up with the BBK's soon enough.

 

Two of my buddies have the BBK shorties on their cars with the Hellion Turbo kits. They are both happy with the performance of them... though I'm not entirely sure if you can use LT headers with the Hellion kit.

 

The Hellion single kit uses the factory exhaust manifolds, so a set of shorties could work but long tubes will cause problems. It comes with custom downpipes to direct the exhaust into 1 pipe so you'd have to get some custom work done if you hoped to do it with LT's.
That is if you were only looking at the Hellion system, but the principle is the same with most other kits. 2 down pipes off the regular manifolds into 1 inlet pipe for the compressor.

 

Yeah, I realize the LT's would be a problem which is why I decided I would have to get shorties if I wanted to go turbo. Thanks for all the responses guys.

 

The Hellion kit came with a catted y-pipe and we recently swapped it out for an off-road version... it saved a lot of weight and sounds a TONS better than the catted version.

If you get the Hellion, I recommend getting the offroad pipe as well!

 

QFT
(Except I'd invest in a mid muffler or a pair of axle backs to smooth out the rasp you get from the O/R setup)

 

I'm currently having the Hellion single turbo kit installed on my '01 GT. I have Hooker ceramic long tubes, but they won't work with the Hellion kit so instead of going back to the sh!tty looking stock exhaust manifolds, I went with some tuned-length BBK ceramic shorties. No issues and I know that they look better than the stock manifolds. I'm in Iraq right now, so I haven't gotten to see it yet, but I'll be back in the states within the week and I'll try and get some pics up.