ZZPerformance HL Camshaft
The Basics
When I decided to add a cam to my car, there were only a few grinds available. My choices were between the Thrasher Race Cam, the Grand Prix Store #1, and ZZP's VS and HL cams. The Thrasher cam was just too big in my opinion for a daily driven vehicle, and the GPS first grind left many of it's owners with lackluster performance. This left me with a choice of either of the ZZP cams. Since I already had ported and polished heads, I chose the HL grind, since it was advertised to work well with heads touched up to increase flow over .500". The cam features 206/218 degrees of duration and .512"/.528" of lift at .050" while offering a 115 degree Lobe Separation Angle.
Impressions
I really like this cam, it offers great power increases over the entire RPM range and maintains near perfect driveability. There is only a slight lope at idle, and unless you are actually listening for it, you wouldn't even realize that it was there. I used to launch at approximately 2000 RPMs, however after adding the cam I noticed that I was able to reduce my 60' times by .15 - .25 seconds simply by brake torquing to just shy of 3000 RPMs. This tells me that there is a significant gain available, simply by adding a higher stall torque converter. The last thing that I feel is important to note is that this cam certainly requires raised shift points -which I did expect when I made the purchase- I just haven't felt it neccessary to go that route just yet and that money could be better spent elsewhere. While I have no dyno data to prove my theory yet, it is quite evident to anyone who rides in the car that there is more power to be found after my Grand Prix Store PCM's 5800 shift point. The car continues to pull straight until the shift with no drop in power. At some point, I will get some dyno pulls done and get Digital Horsepower to cut me a REAL PCM.Once my camera gets fixed to record sound again, I will include a sound clip of my car at idle with the HL cam...Stay tuned!