[A Quiet Boom]

execmalibu,

Well I'm sticking up for you for several reasons. Mainly I believe it's totally within the range of possiblity. Second I'm a lot like you, most of what I've learned about engine building has been the hard way, at a dragstrip with a pile of broken parts. I'm also the type that will just go out and do things that "can't be done" just for the heck of it or even out of spite. Third is that I can't stand what I'll call internet "experts", 99% of what I know in this world came from actually doing it, not reading about it on the internet. On another forum one guy has a sig line that reads "google is not a substitute for intelligence" how true! Fourth I know my car, it's gearing and how high I've revved it. I used to take the internally stock 3.0 to 7000 all the time and it never hurt anything, I don't actually know the redline for a 3.0 but I think it's around 6200-6500. Since my dyno sheets indicated max HP around 6000 that's about where I shift it now when I'm thrashing on it, no need for me to go to 7000 if the power starts falling of at 6000. My speedo is within a few MPH and I've had it at an indicated 145 at 7000 RPM (but I'm not telling where) my car has a short geared 911 box (70-71 901) and if I do the math for 165 I need to be jsut under 8000 RPM. I figure to do that I'll need a complete top end as well as pistons, I don't know about rods and crank. My engine just quits breathing at 6000. This is not the case with the S's I've ridden in as well as read the specs on. The 2.4S made 190@6500 RPM stock according to BA's book with the '72 2.8RSR making 308@8000. Wanna get an idea as to what you have, pull the intake or the exhaust and measure the port if the ports are 38mm or larger there's a good chance you HP peak is up around 8000 based on the specs in BA's book. Bruce Anderson has long been considered an authority on these cars so I'm comfortable with using his numbers.

IIRC your rods are unlikely to be titanium as I believe it has a shorter lifespan than forged steel, besides with the relatively short stroke of these engines they don't need to be anything other than well balanced forged steel. My drag motor was a stroker Windsor Ford, 410". That's a 4" stroke with a 4.040" bore, any idea how ridiculously high the psiton speed is with that kind of stroke at 8000?, yet it held together just fine (well unless like I stated earlier I got too aggressive with fuel or timing). My guess is you've got something between a 2.4S with well ported heads and a good cam like the 901/20 and a 2.8RSR spec motor stuffed into the 2.4S case.

Poking around the internet tonight I wanted to know just how much HP was required to move a car down the interstate at 65 MPH and I came across this page:

http://www.mayfco.com/hpvsspd.htm

It's for a 2400lb Sunbeam Tiger and extrapolating from the numbers for 160 and 170 MPH I get about 275HP required to make a Tiger go 165. I figure the Tiger and the 911 to be close enough in aerodynamic drag for the sake of this argument.

To make it even more plausible, my brother is an engineer for Ford and he has a term, "stacking tolerances" wherein sometimes the errors are all in one direction and thus the total error is greater. If your tach and your speedo are somewhat optimistic and the car is actually doing 160 at 8000 RPM while indicating 165 and 8500 RPM you'd need only about 250HP, not a difficult number for a massaged MFI motor to achieve based on some of Henry Schmidt's posts in the engine forum. It's possible this car was a special wishes program car, the PO had a built engine installed, the factory ran out of stock heads and dropped on a set of RSR heads, etc. Any number of things could explain this. We already know the gearing is there, 180 MPH then I'd say you're crazy LOL.