Snow Performance Methanol Injection Kit - Hooked On Meth!

Water/methanol injection has been used since World War II to help heavily laden fighter and bomber planes boost their power by cooling the turbos and increasing boost. In piston engines, like the ones we’re used to, the fluid cools the combustion chamber and allows for greater cylinder pressure before detonation rears its ugly head. Snow had been using water/methanol injection since the early ’80s when he had a hot 12.5:1-compression Mopar street monster. He found that even with the good gas of the day he couldn’t keep from pinging, and it would subsequently lose power. Adding the injection brought the power right to where it should be, and he started manufacturing the kits for fellow racers. Soon word got out and the Snow Performance name became directly associated with providing a solution for the pump-gas blues. Sounds exactly like what our fine Ford friend was fending for.

The first 90-degree day of the year might not have been ideal for the crew at C&C Performance in Carthage, Tennessee, and the owner of the cleanest ’79 Mustang Cobra on the planet, Don Jackson, to be out sweating in the sun to install the kit. Surely though it would be the perfect day to see whether the high latent heat of vaporization that the methanol provides would cool the combustion process enough to make a noticeable difference in power.

The Stage 2 Muscle Car kit typically uses a common 1-inch carb spacer with holes drilled and tapped in the sides to mount the injectors provided, however, since the car was already equipped with a nitrous plate and was hood-clearance limited, the decision was made to drill and tap into the sides of Don’s Vic Jr. intake manifold to mount the nozzles.

Plumbing the kit was easy, since it uses push-to-lock tubing and connectors. The only caveat was that the pump must be mounted below the reservoir, since it will only gravity feed to the pump.

Once the plumbing and wiring were done, we strapped Jackson’s red Cobra to C&C’s Dynojet chassis dyno for a little truth session. The boys started out making a run with the car in its normal state of tune, which included VP113 fuel and the timing hovering at 36 degrees. The car put down a respectable 361 rear-wheel horsepower through a C4 tranny and an 8.8 rearend spinning 255-series Mickey Thompson Drag Radials. That was with the aforementioned 12:1 compression, a set of ported World Products heads, and a 242/246-at-.050 solid flat-tappet cam. Your basic old-school combo good for low 7-second eighth-mile e.t.’s. For round two, we filled the injector tank with straight pure methanol for a back-to-back test. The dyno graph was almost identical except down maybe 2 horses total. That would indicate that the engine already had plenty of octane and the added methanol just made the engine a little rich.

For the final test we pulled the plug on the Snow kit and ran the engine on pump gas only. There was a slight bit of audible detonation as the engine climbed through its powerband, but we were all shocked once the dyno graph popped up on the screen. It had dropped 50 hp!

Apparently, the methanol injection had increased the octane the engine was seeing enough so that it performed just as well as the straight race gas. Wow, a product that worked as good as—no better—than claimed! Never before has being hooked on meth been a good thing. One thing is for sure though, with gas prices as high as they are, Jackson’s old Mustang couldn’t have chosen a better time to become a methanol addict!