It can be bored to a max of 4.25, still leaving a 0.200 wall, and stroked to 4.25 yeilding 484 cu inches. It has an especially thick deck at 0.375 and 6 bolts per cylinder for supercharging and nitrous applications plus 6 bolt mains combined with an extended skirt. There are many other details too numerous to list here. Things like crankcase breathing passages between adjacent cyl pairs, or bays, like the LS7, but much larger, said to free up around 40 hp at 5000 rpm, more higher up.

Chevy says it will support up to 2500 hp. A new tall deck block will follow that will accept a larger stroke yeilding over 520 cu inches. Both of these blocks will accept any and all prior LS components for total mixing and matching.

Chevy also has new L92 heads ($ 800 a pair fully assembled !) and a fuel injected manifold and a carb manifold (each around $ 900). They are said to produce around 525 hp, 600 hp if CNC ported, both in naturally aspirated form.

Pretty amazing stuff for an old school, 2 valve, pushrod motor that will rev reliably to 7200 rpm. You've got to give them credit.

For some time I've envisioned Chevy making a version of the M3 with 4 doors and short front overhang (3 series like rather than the long nose of the 2 door Camaros and older Corvettes) all in a semi-stylish conservative body not terribly different in shape from the M3s two box plan. 

While going thru the specs mentally it occured to me that it could be done more easily than I previously imagined by using the Corvette platform and simply adding an appropriate body. I checked the wheel bases and they are close enough to work.

The new Corvette is 105.7" and the M3 is surprisingly the longer of the two at 107.0", assuming my googling was correct since they both changed wheelbase recently.

So what's the point here? Nothing other than sharing a day dream and solicitating comments, pro and con. Chevy would never do it but could they? Is it reasonably possible to accomplish? Maybe compare it to the coming M3 V8. Which would outperform the other?

Maybe Brian and Terry could shed some real world experience from their 3 series, LS project?

Maybe I should just delete the above?

There obviously were unique problems in that particular circumstance that lead to the high number of failures. It was not inherent to the motor and if you read on further in the thread they were not all engine explosions.

At least the motors can be replaced for a 1/3 rd of what a comparable BMW motor would cost, maybe less than a 1/3 rd.

LSx motors can be built to be sturdy.  We have an engine builder that says a $5k, 500hp LS2 can rev to 8000rpm and 8500-9000 are not out of the question anymore with some upgraded valvetrain.  We have a customer that we're about to start building a car for that will be a DE car.  We'll take precautions to keep it from blowing up on lap one.  Flares, full suspension, big motor, brakes, etc.  We had a break through yesterday that might allow the finished LS1 kit to be even easier to "drop in".  We'll see, but it will help make the kit something that no one has been able to do yet. 

EDIT:  Like you said it is easy to make a 400 cu in motor out of a small block with bore and stroking it.  After that you can raise the deck height and go crazy with displacement. 

Frank, my 4 door M3 daily driver is #3 on the swap list. I need 400hp in my DD. 

Brian Hanchey
vorshlag.com

Check out ast-usa.com

--Ron

The wheelbase is also the longest of these 2 door vehicles at 109.8", which in part accounts for the weight.

If Chevy built a 4 door on the Vette platform do you think the weight would be higher than the Vette, the same or lower? Fiberglass, if that's what they are still using, is not light.

I'm thinking it would come in a bit lower than the M3 because the Vette chassis is lighter than the corresponding M3 chassis.

I'm trying to arrive at comparative weights, cost/price and performance for the real M3 and the imaginary Chevy3.

The objective is to see if Chevy could make a better M3, or not.

Now, the easiest way to build a V8 M3 is to take an M3 and stuff the LS1 motor in it. That is doable.

At PRI the new LSX block was on hand and caused quite a buzz. Capable of almost 8.0L in displacement, capable of withstanding the block loads of 2500hp, equipped for both wet or dry sump oiling, and a cost quoted at $1800 at the show... which is 1/3rd the cost of the last "big" LS-based block (C5R dry sump) and even less than the LS7 7.0L (dry sump, production) block. I didn't manage to take any pictures of the new LSX block in the GM booth, due to the huge crowd there.

There was also this wet sump version of the LS7 crate motor, also shown at the PRI show this week. 505hp, 7.0L.

The Katech built 7.0L C5R racing motor. Built for 24-hr endurance racing. Gobs of hp and durible...

Here's an individual runner EFI manifold for the LS1. It looked... erotic...

Terry Fair - www.vorshlag.com & www.ast-usa.com
"Alpha" E36-LS1 (XPrepared/G Class "No Class") '97 M3 (STU/F Class), '91 318is (STS/C Class)

The unit above (intake manifold and trumpets only) is a Barry Grant aftermarket item called a Cross Ram. It looks like a fuel injected set up at first glance but if you look closely at the pictures on www.barrygrant.com you will notice that each stack has a booster venturi sitting dead center in the stack making it look very much like a carburetor. The indiviual fuel lines, that come out of the fuel rail, connect right to the booster's support bridge. The sign below the unit has lettering that looks like YFI or VFI which could indicate that it's a FI set-up for a V8 motor, maybe. What do you think? Carb or FI?

Barry Grant is known for the precision 4 barrel carburetors his firm produces and sells to hot rodding America. Everything he makes and supports is carburetors lending a bit more reasoning as to what the above units may be. The Demon carb shown on the home page has removable venturi (red items) which can be replaced by different sized venturi IDs as  an additional tuning aid. The venturi shown in the stacks of the Cross Ram manifold (in blue) are proabably replacable too lending more evidence to the units being a single throat carb.

Along with the pictures of the above are pictures of a new carburetted set-up (again more carburetors) called the 'Bad Man'. Its a linear 4 barrel carb with each barrel on a straight line running from the front to the rear of the open chamber, intake manifold that feeds 8