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dj4monie · 12-08-2002, 11:22 PM

Americans no a thing or three about making automatics fast, so from the Neon world I'll give you some pointers.

First, all non-performance automatic cars are LAZY off the line. The easiest and cheapest way to fix this is nitrous oxide. It's not uncommon for automatic cars to get easy 2.2's and lower 60ft times with stock tires, as the power comes on more smoothly compared to a stick car which tend to shock the tires into breaking traction off the line.

Now if you don't want to use nitrous, again I would consider it. I makes the biggest difference in ET's on an automatic car. There's no other way your going to drop 2 seconds off your ET from bolt-ons and engine work alone. If you want to do it N/A you'll need to get a higher stall torque converter, shorter final drive ratio and higher mutlipier for your tranfer gear.

Look for heavier cars that use the same engine or same transmission the Sentra does. Heavier cars with the same engine usually don't make more power, but to help move the weight, they usually put shorter gearing in the car. I think the Alitma uses the same tranny doesn't it? It's a heavier car, so it should have a different final drive ratio.

Next you'll need a more aggressive shifting valvebody. By raising line pressure you can quicken the shifts as automatics tends to shift slowly and softly for the sake of confort with in-town driving. If valvebodies from a more performmace orenited car is avaliable then use that, or contact Level 10.

For a torque converter, you can contact your local transmission shop to see if they can locate a shop that custom builds converters. If not JBO or Level 10 and another company that runs ads in Turbo Magazine can help you.

If you can't find a shorter gear ratio, you can use shorter tires, like BFG's 205/50-14, which are a full inch shorter than the tires you usually find on compacts. That effectively raises your gear ratio.

In engine tuning you might wanna be a bit bias to torque. Automatic cars never run the trap speeds manual cars do, so what you need to do is outpower people in the 1st 1/8 and then hold them off the rest of the way.

My friend Manuel has a automatic 2000 Neon. He could only muster high 16's in the 1/4 mile with mildy bolt-ons. After adding a 3000rpm stall torque converter, 1:2 ratio transfer gear and changing the final drive to 3.05, combined with 205/50-14 BFG drag radials gave us a ratio around 4.00 or so.

With a 50hp shot of nitrous and about 75lbs taken out of the car he went 14.89@92 with a 2.0 60ft time. He got a 1.9 later that day but the bottle was running out so he went slower. Sometime early next year, we should run low 14's with a 75hp shot, ported head and Crane camshaft.

You have your work cut-out for you, maybe that's why alot of Neon owners have made the Auto to Manual swap popular.