Advantage R07
 BIG runners on the dry R07 intake manifold. |
Bottom line – how much more power does it make than the SB2? No one is officially saying specifically (of course), but it must be useful in this application for all this redesign (and retooling) effort by the factory and the R&D by the Cup teams (Hendrick Engines, DEI, RCR, Joe Gibbs). The most I could get out of my Chevy engine contacts was that the HP gain is “significant.” More important, race engine reliability and efficiency have been improved – meaning the R07 engine stays at best power for longer.
Mark Cronquist, head engine builder for Joe Gibbs Racing was not shy about the advantages of the R07 over the SB2. It’s more like this engine has evened-up with the competition:
“It’s just better all over. There’s a little bit of performance advantage. I don’t think we’ve tapped into where we can go with it. There is a little bit of an increase in power, but not as much as we think there is in the future. Basically, the torque curve and horsepower curve is based off of our SB2 engine. We made it that way because we think we know what makes the car go around on the race tracks, and we’ve catered it to that. It’s not like we picked up 20 horsepower and lost 10 lb-ft of torque. We’re basically the same. We’re a little bit better everywhere, but it’s on the same curve. We just raised the bar up a little bit. The way the motor looks after 600 miles off of our dyno looks a lot better than our old SB2, so we hope that there’s better durability and performance.
Teams used to have to fab up the rocker covers with oil spray bars in them for the SB2 – now they are cast in on the R07 as you can see from the fitting holes and tube outlines.
“We’re finally more even with what Dodge and Toyota have. It kind of got us back in the same playing field, back in what’s considered NASCAR’s box. We were outside of the box, actually below the box. We had disadvantages and they finally let us get the same advantages that other manufacturers had over us. I don’t think that we’ve really gotten into much of the [increased] performance part about it. A lot of it is that the shop needs just a lot less time to work on the parts and pieces of it.
“There’s a lot of stuff in this block [R07] that’s already cast into the block that we used to have to make ourselves and try to fit into our blocks. A lot of that took a lot of time and effort to do. If the performance comes, it will come because we’re going to have a lot more time in our shop to work on it.”
The competition can hardly wait.
