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July 1996
History of the Tiger-1 ManifoldHow it began 1995Bill and I started design of the Tiger-1 after we were having a beer one night. We were debating over what carburetor to use on this highly modified car. When Bill finally said "why don't you just fuel inject the thing and be done with it". Well, Bill saw the light bulb go on over my head and knew he had started something. At that moment I knew that we were going to fuel inject the car. We started that night bouncing some ideas around. First we started with the idea of bosses welded into a single plane manifold, then maybe using an original Pontiac mechanical injection system and then maybe modifying the mechanical injection system with electronics. We finally decided that night to try a single plane manifold with bosses on an old 400 we had sitting around. A couple of weeks later, we were at the Winston finals in Pomona. Down in the pit area they had several vendors. I was walking around and stumbled upon Craig Railsback from BDS (Blower Drive Services) who was selling bolt on injection kits for Chevy's. I told him what I was doing with the Pontiac. Craig showed me the electronics part of his system. I was so impressed, that I went to BDS the next week and bought the whole system, minus the Chevy intake of course. BDS does make a bolt on intake for Pontiac's, but it will only accept the BDS blower bolted on top. We did drool over the BDS blower for a while, but decided that we wanted to keep the whole motor under the hood. With all of the electronics in hand, we started to modify an Edelbrock Torquer I manifold. After a couple of weekends we had the manifold ready. We started that motor up in the frame for the new car we were building. It ran very well, but with no load we were just guessing on some of the computer settings. We just could not seem to get a lot of torque from the single plane Edelbrock. That's when we knew we were going to just have to make our own. So, Bill and I sat down with a pencil and the back of a pizza box and started designing (we still have the pizza box in the trophy case). Once Bill finished the final design, it only took him 3 weekends to finish it. He finished it just 3 days before we were going to leave for the nationals. First run July 1996The Tiger-1 fuel injection Manifold started without any trouble at 2am. We fired the Jim Butler motor up and quickly set the timing to match the computer readout. After the first start for about 10 minutes, we put the car up onto the trailer and headed for Wichita Kansas for the GTOAA Nationals. Once in Wichita, we did the final assembly of the rest of the car right there on the concours show floor. People would come by and look at us like we were nuts. Some would say "you know there is no project class at this show, don't you?", but we made it 5 minutes before judging started. We did OK. A Concurs Silver Certificate and a Best of Show for Concurs Modified! The day after the show we were approached by High Performance magazine. It seems they wanted to do a feature article on the car. Wow, once I got my stomach out of my mouth I of course was happy to comply. They shot pictures right there in front of the convention center. Unfortunately the pictures they shot were destroyed by the airport x-ray machine. They sent out another photographer a couple of months later and shot the car again (see HPP article). Here is a couple of before pictures of our Black GTO.
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