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Want to buy one of the three twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter Northstar V8-engined LMP02 race cars Cadillac built for ALMS in 2002? One Ohio eBay seller's got two up for auction right now. Buy it now price? $355,000. [eBay via Autoblog] More »
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If you're going to put a Detroit V8 with FWD transaxle amidships in your Fauxborghini and for some reason the Olds Toronado 425 (or even the 500-cube powerplant from a 1970 Eldorado) doesn't do it for you, how about the readily available Cadillac Northstar? That's what we've got here, and it can be yours for just $22,000! More »
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I remember a time in the early 1990s when small-block Chevy HEI distributors finally started showing up in large numbers in the cheap self-service junkyards; those of us driving Chevy-powered heaps could rejoice at being freed from the misery of ignition points for a mere ten bucks. Now that point has been reached with the Cadillac Northstar engine: an aluminum DOHC V8 available for your personal engine swap madness for just $100 complete (on Half Price Day, that is). Here's a '93 Eldorado I found at a local junkyard not long ago. Hmmm... wonder how hard it would be to fit this engine in a Cavalier? More »
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When we first saw the Splinter wooden supercar back in February, it was one of those "oh yeah, right, a wooden supercar, whatever" situations. We thought the Splinter was a flight of fancy — nothing more than crazy auto-loving NC State kids being crazy auto-loving NC State kids. We were wrong. Splinter's just made the leap from pine-scented vaporware to real life parts and assemblies. We're just as shocked as you are. It seems Joe Harmon and his associates have been hard at work actually building this crazy all-wood supercar. More »
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Since yesterday's Packard Straight Eight Swap Edition (which was won by the '37 Pontiac) was so much fun, we're going to stick with Alternative Powerplant Hell for another day. All engine swaps are fun, of course, but the best ones involve stuffing an engine much, much larger than anything the car's designers ever considered. When you accomplish such a swap, you get respect; when you start with the knuckle-shredding, sanity-destroyingly tight engine compartment of a small mid-engined car (say, a Fiero or MR2)... well, that's when folks start treating you with the deference reserved for the truly mad! More »
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It's not often when the closing of loopholes reveals good news for a company. In Cadillac's case, it resulted in a horsepower bump for its 4.4-liter supercharged Northstar V8. GM announced back in April it was the first automaker to follow the SAE's new voluntary, third-party power and torque testing and certification procedure, which was designed to eliminate automakers' use of "best-case" scenarios when rating horsepower, making the results more likely to be repeatable in the smoggy, humid environs of the real world. For the Chevrolet Corvette Z06, the first GM car to be tested using the new procedure, the result were a rating of 505hp from its 7.0-liter powerplant. In the case of the Cadillac STS-V, the SAE results topped GM's estimated figure of 440hp, with ratings of 469hp at 6,400 rpm and 439ft/lbs of torque at 3,900 rpm. More »
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