Honda unveiled its Ridgeline Baja truck at SEMA but kept the veil of secrecy around the adaption of its sports-car-influenced 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6 to power an off-road racer.
“We’re not talking about specifics right now,” says Art St. Cyr, president of Honda Performance Development (HPD), builder of the engine, when asked about revised torque curve or redline to suit the driver needs to dig out of silt bed in the desert or climb a steep, rocky hill.
Built in partnership with Proctor Racing Group, the Ridgeline will run in the Baja 1000 later this month. According the Honda, the HR35TT is designed to produce upwards of 550 horsepower, and the engine in the race truck will have the same block, cylinder heads and crankshaft as the production engine when the second-generation 2017 Ridgeline hits the dealerships some time in the first half of 2016.
St. Cyr says changes were made to the cam timing and an exclusive plenum was developed to move the torque curve, but the turbos are the same size as the sports car engine that was approved for the Daytona Prototype class in IMSA.
“Basically, you’d be hard pressed to look at the motor and find any hardware differences,” says St. Cyr. “Obviously some of the mapping has unique applications for desert racing that would be different than our sports car application.”
The biggest challenges for Honda engineers was addressing the blistering heat that the truck will encounter. The team developed unique cooling lines and increased the oil capacity to assist in cooling. Intercooling placement and plumbing were also tested and adjusted as needed with a special emphasis on keeping sand from plugging up air flow to the radiators and other cooling components.
“We had to do a lot of things for heat management, durability and reliability to make sure it can survive in that punishing environment,” adds St. Cyr.