CAMARO TWIN TURBO
DETONATION
I dedicated a whole page to detonation because I have never seen anything so violent! At the dyno we pushed the pump gas program to 22 pounds of boost and my engine detonated to the point of head gasket failure. The picture above attests to the damage. You can begin to understand the forces we are dealing with when you consider that the gasket was pushed out 1/4 inch, overcoming the force of 17 head stubs clamped at 75 psi.

Some ways to deter detonation on a turbo motor are good intercooling, proper air fuel ratio, and proper ignition timing. I am a firm believer in extracting a lot of power from pump gas, but go easy. It only takes a few shots of detonation at these power levels to end up with a head gasket like the one in the above picture. My advice for a small block with 9:1 compression and good intercooling is to keep it under 15 psi with pump gas. If you want to go to 20 psi, use race gas. Your o-rings and thousand-dollar pistons will fail if the engine detonates. Do not push your engine to detonation, it is not worth it.