Baba Yaga gets a new Motor

By Preston Folkestad News autocross, baba yaga, c10, frankenstein, optima ultimate street car, racetruck, Wegner automotive 0 Comments

For those that don’t know we blew a motor up at Road America in Baba Yaga and have been thrashing to get it back together to head to the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational held at COTA in Austin, Texas. We made it just in time to run the c10 in the autocross and finish up mid pack with only 3 runs (not bad for a new motor set up against corvettes and Camaros)

The new motor is a 427LSR dry sump built by Wegner Automotive, utilizing Frankenstein Engine Dynamics Lo-Pro intake and F7 Heads, and Dailey Engineerings LS Billet Race Pan, Oil tank and Air/oil separator. This combo made around 700HP on the dyno on pump gas and should be plenty to hurdle the truck around the road course and autocross tracks alike.

Changing over to a dry sump motor is aways a challenge, due to the remote oil tank, oil pump location, new oil cooler, and running AN Lines from the motor to the tank. We couldn’t have done it in time without sheer determination from our team to get the truck to Texas.

One of the most impressive parts that I personally saw driving the truck was the cooling system. Now I know that I work at GC and that we try to push our products, but honestly, our drop in cooling systems are nothing but impressive when it comes to cooling. With the new dry sump we needed a separate oil cooler to run the system properly. We sacrificed one fan on the radiator, cut a new shroud and mounted the oil cooler directly to the shroud. Originally the thought was to add a smaller fan to the cooler to run remotely off of a manual switch however we ran into clearance issues with the intake tubes. This new cooler had me nervous for engine temps, but I was pleasantly surprised that oil temps held around 180 and overall engine temps stayed at 201 both on track and slow cruising.

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RPM Track Day

After we got back from Texas we thought it would be a smart idea to get the truck and new Shelby GT350 out for some testing and tuning. We headed to one of our local road courses to get some time behind the wheel and figure out some bugs. We ran into some issues with the power steering on the truck and ended up having to replace the rack at the track but ended up getting a good few hours in on the course. The video below is right after we got the rack working so I was a bit hesitant on corners.

Now the Shelby is a different creature! Ford spent some serious time and money developing it to be a track monster and daily driver…and frankly it shows. Bob was more than happy with the car and is excited to run it in the Optima Series going into 2021.