Hi, Wolf. Hope you are getting some miles on your beautiful car!
No, the indents on the side I elected not to open up. I've seen cars running in the Masters Series both ways, so I decided to just leave them closed. I have holes in my rear plexi window, so any pressure build-up is vented back there rather than filling most of the back of the hardtop up and venting out those side vents...
I haven't really driven the car much since installing the IDA's..it definitely breaths better up top and zings the whole way up to infinity all the while the fuel gauge does this rapid counter clockwise rotation at a rate never before experienced..lol. As far as power/torque goes, I'm not sure there is much noticable difference between my 44IDF's and these 48IDA's....there might be 20HP there..but to me it's not noticable. Jim Inglese is to be up at the SAAC 37 event, so I'll have him look things over and get his butt dyno impressions.
One of the set backs has been my loss of coolant..I thought this was due to a leak between the front water port and the #1 & #5 cylinders, but after removing the carbs/intake and replacing the Fel-Pro gaskets with a thicker intake gasket, I realized that my new handy-dandy water pump bypass modification from the Comp water neck was allowing the full force of the water pump to push coolant back into the Harrison tank, over power the rad cap spring pressure and vent out the overflow hose onto the ground. After a 40 mi drive with some short bursts of high RPM throttle, I was having to put 1/2gallon of collant back in the tank... So to combat this, I used some "Right Stuff" permatex and spliced a restriction in the tube feeding back to the water pump bypass circuit - which amounted to a 1/4" flat washer for the sake of what-the-he**-let's-try-this convenience. So after a trip to Autozone for a 20lb rad cap, it appears to have slowed to a stop. After these freakish afternoon hail storms and torrential downpours subside, I'll take it for a drive and see how things go.. Here's a pic of the restriction I added:
- Allen.