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V8 engine sound, american iron vs. ferrari

21K views 51 replies 18 participants last post by  blight 
#1 ·
why are the sounds of the typical american V8 engines so different from the sound of a ferrari california V8 engine?

the ferrari V8 is a 90 degree block, 266 cubes, DOHC, EFI, 3.70 bore 3.05 stroke, nothing like if it came out of this world to me.

but the sound it makes is like music, sounds like a ninja bike or something like that, on the other hand the american V8's though nice but they sound like an old F-600 dump truck with a busted muffler.

sure the ferrari revs past 8.000 but at lower r's in the usual american V8 range they still sound like a jap bike with a yoshimura exhaust, at idle they have a sligthty similar kinda rough sound like the american v8's, this leads me to think they have rather hot camshafts, but nothing an american engine couldn't have.

I would love making my beloved american cars sound like a ferrari, could this be possible?
 
#2 ·
You sure about the Ferrari? I don't think all of Ferrari's V8s are 90-degree blocks with 90-degree cranks. I think some are what's called flat-plane.
I doubt the Ferrari has 180-degree headers, because they're a huge hassle that take up a huge amount of space around the engine.
You can dramatically change the sound of the real muscle, which Ferrari can never be, by adding a true X pipe top a true dual exhaust.
But engines aren't for sound. That's not their purpose. The purpose is great output with great BSFC. Efficiency. Pick any new 2012 'vette. Every one of them gives more MPG than any Ferrari of the same HP / acceleration.
Forget engine sound, choose the quietest muffs that actually scavenge. The cops shouldn't hear it when you go to full throttle. If you care what you hear, buy a radio / CD player.
 
#3 ·
ferrari's website says its a 90 degree V8

x pipes make them american v8's sound much better, and make more power, I've done lots of them, I own a muffler shop.

hearing the engine's sound is a big part of the fun of driving a performance car, us gearheads love to hear it, and you can tell what engine/brand is just by the sound they make.

there are some unmistakeable sounds, like the harley's for instance.

stereos are for family or daily drivers, true performance cars don't have them.
 
#4 ·
Part of it is heads and cams. The american v8's (the older ones) had terrible intake and exhaust tracts, everything from the air cleaner to the exhaust tip. Every last thing on a ferrari was designed for a purpose not designed for minimal cost of production. Compare a brand new ls7 to a 10 year old ferrari or porsche and the quality is still worse. BUT american engines have more displacement and lower cost, they can overcome a lot.
 
#10 ·
joelster said:
The firing order has a lot to do with sound. Crafty guys can manipulate the sound by running specific headers. There's a science to it, and Ferrari's pay close attention to it. Here's a regular old LT1 car with standard firing order 18436572 but with 180 headers.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZTbR6C6Lw

Sounds like it's about 2000rpm higher at every rev.

well that vette sure sounds a lot like a ferrari, though a bit lower pitched, but really nice, I wonder how they fitted 180 deg headers in there. I love it..!!
 
#11 ·
Augusto said:
well that vette sure sounds a lot like a ferrari, though a bit lower pitched, but really nice, I wonder how they fitted 180 deg headers in there. I love it..!!
Any exhaust shop "should" be able to handle work like that, especially shops that deal with custom exhaust systems for show-type cars. The trick is to know which cylinders to cross over to the other side to maximize the effect. They usually run the tubes under the oil pan. Plan on spending $1000 minimum.
 
#13 ·
Ferrari uses a 180* crank while we use a 90* crank. From what I understand a 180* crank make slightly more power due to more even cylinder scavenging but it a much harder engine to balance and run with less vibration. The 90* crank runs a lot smoother and it better balanced. I read some place about a team that was experimenting with a 180* crank in a SBC and had to cut the testing short because the engine has such bad harmonics. They said with the 180* the engine is very sensitive to bore/stroke ratio, they were running a long stroke and that the engine needs to be really over square. Long stroke won't work.
 
#14 ·
Augusto said:
why are the sounds of the typical american V8 engines so different from the sound of a ferrari california V8 engine?

the ferrari V8 is a 90 degree block, 266 cubes, DOHC, EFI, 3.70 bore 3.05 stroke, nothing like if it came out of this world to me.

but the sound it makes is like music, sounds like a ninja bike or something like that, on the other hand the american V8's though nice but they sound like an old F-600 dump truck with a busted muffler.

sure the ferrari revs past 8.000 but at lower r's in the usual american V8 range they still sound like a jap bike with a yoshimura exhaust, at idle they have a sligthty similar kinda rough sound like the american v8's, this leads me to think they have rather hot camshafts, but nothing an american engine couldn't have.

I would love making my beloved american cars sound like a ferrari, could this be possible?
Yes, but expensive; the Ferrari uses a flatplane crankshaft (180 degrees between throws) with a firing order of 1,5,3,7,4,8,2,6. Your Chevy uses a crossplane crank (90degrees between throws) with a firing order of 1,8,4,3,6,5,7,2 or the LS and some modded Gen Is of 1,8,7,2,6,5,4,3.

Flatplane cranks have been tried many times (look up Smokey Yunick for one)
never with the result in power thought to be there and always with more vibration issues to be settled. The whole problem is with a flatplane crank is that it makes a V8 into two inline 4s running on a common crankshaft. This design of a 4 has a lot of difficult to resolve 2nd order imbalances, these are where the moving masses are not in opposing directions and at the same point in a trigonometric sense of position versus degrees of rotation. So these things are harder to balance up. This may be fine for a company that makes about as many engines a year as Chevy does in a day, but it's just to fussy and expensive for GM's, Ford's or Chrysler's rate of production and as far as racing is concerned has never proven to develop the power this configuration's proponents espouse.

You can do this to a Chevy, the crank and camshafts are out there in somebody's scrap pile.

Actually the last time I was on hold for the local Ferrari's parts counter I made the counder guy kind of mad when I told him the engine sounds they play when you're on hold, sounded like a bunch of mad Yamaha's. He became quite indignant and informed me that this was the sound of a V12 winding out. Beats me, still sounds like a bike race through my hearing aids.

Bogie
 
#16 ·
Lingenfelter is using a flat-plane crank in their 5th gen Camaro shop car. They have that car flying! FWIW you can get a camshaft for an sbc ground with many different firing orders. I run the 4/7 swap in my car. The chevy engineers have stated that the LS firing order produces the least amount of bearing load on the crank ie: the bearing loads on the 5 caps were very close. But that is way off topic here.
 
#17 ·
joelster said:
The firing order has a lot to do with sound. Crafty guys can manipulate the sound by running specific headers. There's a science to it, and Ferrari's pay close attention to it. Here's a regular old LT1 car with standard firing order 18436572 but with 180 headers.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZTbR6C6Lw

Sounds like it's about 2000rpm higher at every rev.

That is not an LT1.
 
#18 ·
joelster said:
Lingenfelter is using a flat-plane crank in their 5th gen Camaro shop car. They have that car flying! FWIW you can get a camshaft for an sbc ground with many different firing orders. I run the 4/7 swap in my car. The chevy engineers have stated that the LS firing order produces the least amount of bearing load on the crank ie: the bearing loads on the 5 caps were very close. But that is way off topic here.
Actaully not, bearing loads and balance both of moving masses and the forces of power application or absorption depending on which stroke a cylinder is on all have an impact on bearing load. This would include firing order. The nice thing about EFI is now it's possible to disconnect the firing order from the intake manifold configuration of 180 degrees, as with EFI 180 degree manifolds are or at least can be meaningless toward the optimization of most of the power band excepting the area around max out put RPMs. Certainly the manipulation of the firing order can also be done with an open plenum style manifold, but strangely for decades wasn't really taken advantage of.

With the Gen I and II SBC's with the typical factory firing order, the center two throws see a lot of couple. If we could freeze frame the shaft and measure the forces you'd see the shaft trying to use the middle bearing as a fulcrum to teeter about while the number 2 and number 4 are each absorbing a moment of rotation about the fulcrum (think of a teeter totter in our frozen motion example) so 2 and 4 see a lot more load than 1,5, or even 3. Changing the firing order can be used to manipulate the forces on the crank at any given point which won't eliminate this problem but certainly can reduce it to where each journal is loaded more equally.

Bogie
 
#20 ·
I have an old school 350 in a 240 z datsun. One of my iterations, the car had single exhaust, 11:1 cr, a compcam 292H, with a 5 spd. It would rev all the way to valve float (7200 rpm). It did not sound like an american V8. But once I added dual exhaust, it sounded like an american v8. I do miss the single exhaust at 7000 rpm sound, but the duals make more power.
 
#22 ·
During the early 1970's at the NHRA Summernationals at Englishtown New Jersey, there was one funny car that sounderd very different from all of the other famous funny cars that were running there. I can't remember if it was the late Larry Fullerton's Trojan Horse or the late Phil Castronovo's Custom Auto Body funny cars. I asked around in the pits and rumors were it was a flat crank in the engine. I never saw any more references or information on it. Maybe someone has more info. All I can say , boy what a sound from a funny car.
 
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#43 ·
SOO much wrong in all of this I am going to leave most of it alone seeing that you have already been corrected by another person thank god.

also so you are aware a flat crank would be a custom job in the 3500-6000 range. depending on who is willing to do it. crower will for a sbc for about 4k. its complete custom. my 3.25 forged crank cost me the price of free. i think i will stay with that.
 
#23 ·
my friend, the ferrari 458 engine makes 562 hp @ 9.000rpm and it's only 270 cubic inches, normally aspirated, built entirely in aluminum and carbon fiber.

with that efficiency a chevy 6.2 litre should make 774 hp NORMALLY ASPIRATED
but it only makes 630 SUPERCHARGED. just do a simple power to cid ratio math.

I really don't know were did you find that: "Most chevy alum block motors will shame a ferrari v8 in power to weight and power to reliablity/rpm"
 
This post has been deleted
#26 ·
the Ferrari engine is only 4.5 liter and is not a race engine, it's a street car's engine, the Ferrari race engine is only 2.4 liter and makes around 900 hp.

with that efficiency a Nascar 5.8 liter should make 2.175 hp

The Ferrari technology is way superior to chevy's, of course it comes at a price way superior than chevy's

My point is this guy said that a chevy engine is better.. no way, it is not, and I'm a chevy man.
 
#28 ·
leaving the american vs import debate which is not the case, seems like the flat crank is the way to make an american engine sound so sweet, but it's way ahead of a working's man budget, I'm building a V8 powered buggy and have plenty of room to make headers with pipes crossing to the other side and arranging the cylinders in the correct sequence, I'm gonna build them that way and I hope my engine sounds a little bit italian, it would be awsome, old american grunt with the sound of a symphony. (well my engine won't rev past 7.000 rpm, so it won't scream that high)
 
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