Last week I received a call from my friend Geoff Peters. "I want to you to do some surgery on my exhaust's" He had just been reading David Bell's story on the Space city Panteras website on how to cut the guts out of a GTS exhaust. Geoff was never happy with the sound of the standard system and his car does have a 427 DART windsor, so would certainly benefit from a free flowing exhaust.
Until I saw David Bell's pictures, I had no idea quite how restrictive the GTS exhaust boxes where.
My own Pantera has factory group 3 exhausts. These where on the car when I bought it in 1994.
They look identical externally, but on the inside the inlet pipe simply branches into two, and flows straight through with no restriction. I can see this by sticking a probe torch down the tail pipe. This is basically what I have done to Geoff's exhaust, with the exception that I used straight pipe without all the holes.
In the summer of 2002 my friend Tommy Todak (Orange County CA) and I drove my old 1981 Alfa Spider over to France for the Le mans 24 hour. After the race we spent the next 2 weeks driving up over the Alps through Switzerland and down into Italy. On the way back we stopped in at the De Tomaso factory so that Tom could pick up some new exhausts. The men in the spares department where trying to explain the difference between the two types of exhaust box. At that time we didn't know the group 3 exhaust existed (even though I had them on my car)! We spoke no Italian, and they spoke no English. Tom ended up buying the GTS boxes, not realising the other ones where group 3, and much more free flowing and louder..
We should have known what Boom Boom meant, that's the same in any language.
Johnny
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