how much do converters cost and what would be a good one for my pretty much stock lt1 97 T/A A4

 

Do some searches. It all depends on your future plans for the car. If it is a DD I would say from my research that you would be good with anything from 3200-3600. Yank, Fuddle, Vig, it doesnt matter, they all get great reviews.

 

I meant are there any good websites that sells them?

 

I had a A4 with 3.23's also. I experimented on the streets and found that if you are going 30mph, drop it down to D and punch it and your car should really take off, mine chirped the tires everytime. But if you have it in regular drive I would punch it from 50. So remember 30mph-drop it down, 50mph-just punch it in regular drive, that always worked for me and I never lost. Now I have a Corvette, but it has 2.73's which sucks ***. I miss my 3.23's. Hope this helps somehow.

 

Sweet spots are 25 and under...55-70 and it'll drop to second

 

ok, just to clear things up, if you are A4 with 3.23 your sweets spots are:
~33mph --> top of first
~60mph --> top of second

To the guy 2 posts up:
When you drop it into D and punch it at 30mph, you are actually dropping it into 3rd and then the computer downs shifts for you into 1st. So, essentially, dropping it into D is just a waste of time when you could just punch it and let the computer do its job.

FireSilver, sorry, didnt mean to come off rude, but with over 300 posts I figured you had a little bit more experience with you car.

 

This is as others have said all about gearing.

IMO 3.23's on a stock Ls1 are the worst option. Sure from a standstill at the dragstrip it will give you a couple of tenths advantage over a 2.73 geared car, but on the road they are horrible and have dead spots at all the wrong places. Someone at GM did not take into account engine red line, kickdown and internal gear ratio's when they said "hay lets use 3.23's as the performance option for auto's".

The issue is that at anything above 30mph you are going too quick to kick down to first, but it leaves you very low in the rpms in 2nd. 2.73's are much better as it will kick down to 1st at anything under 40mph. At ~39-40mph it will kickdown and place you right smack bang at PEAK torqu in 1st (~4400rpm) so roll racing from this speed is good with a 2.73 geared car.

The best thing to do is use a gear calculator (link in my sig ) and see where the dead spots occur. The 2.73 geared car still has dead spots, but at speeds less of an issue, the first one is ~20mph as 1st gear is low in the rpms, but because it's 1st then it doesn't really matter. The other is at 50-60mph as it will place you just wrong in the rpms.

There are lot of things you can do to help out the situation. A stall will help but it will never over come gearing. It just means the stall will flash higher when you are in low rpms, this will give you more accelaration, but the the gearing issue is still there just slightly obscurred.

Changing the gearing (final drive) will help, but this should only be done with consideration to aims and goals for the car.

2.73:1 (stock A4)
3.23 (stock SS/WS6 A4 optional for other Ls1's)
3.42 (stock M6)
3.73 (aftermakret)
4.10 (aftermarket)

The lower the gearing (numerically higher, like 4.10) the better the ingear accelaration and less chance of dead spots. Down side is lack of terminal speed in gear and increased crusing rpms (more noise and worse mpg).

OD or 4th shouldn't really be used when racing or kicking down at WOT as it's damaging to it, this means on a stock LS1 4.10 gears will limited top speed to ~112mph. If you want 160mph + ability then 4.10's are not for you.

Other things that help are mods to increase the rpm limit, a good cam will allow you to rev higher than the stock 5850rpm shift point. This means each gear can carry more terminal speed. Reprogramming of the shift points and kickdown points will allow much better in gear response. But this is a whole package of mods not just a quick fix.

3.42 seems a pretty good compromise on a decent cammed motor as it will allow 140mph in 3rd yet be pretty dead sopt free, combine this with a good stall (min 3600rpm) and it shoud be awesome from a roll also.

 

You need a stall to erase the deadspot, since the auto only has 4 gears it's natural to have to speeds at which it won't pull as hard.

 

Nice kill, keep it out of "D" and in 1st next time you race.