2000 Pontiac Trans Am LS1 owned by Dan Potter of the Solent Renegades car club

2000 Pontiac Trans-Am
owned by Dan Potter

2000 Pontiac Trans Am Page Navigation

How I came across this Trans-Am

Why I sold my '89 Firebird for this

Purchasing the Car

Importing

SVA Test

Photos of the 2000 Trans Am

Some Close up photos of the 2000 Trans Am

Photos taken in 2002 on Portsdown Hill

Photos taken at various car shows

Hi-Res Photos of the Trans-Am on Portsdown Hill taken by Tim Smith

Videos of the 2000 Trans Am

Videos of Burnouts in this Trans-Am

Things I already have for this Trans-Am

AutoTap diagnogstic software

HP Tuners tuning software

Corsa Cat-Back Exhaust System

LSX Intake Manifold and fuel rails

De-baffling the Ram-Air WS6 hood

Trans-Am Decals

Heads and Cam Decision

Heads and Cam Installation

Future Modifications

Cosmetic Modifications

Performance Modifications

Hire the Car

Hire the Car for Events

Prom Night Hire

Wedding Hire

Birthday Hire

Online Car Hire Quote

2000 WS6 LS1 Trans-Am 5.7L
Car Type	Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am
Year	2000
Engine	5.7L LS1 V8, 6 speed manual with Ram-Air
Estimated Valuee	£23,000
This 2000 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am car was purchased over the Internet using Ebay, found a dealer selling the car in Pensacola, Florida. Wired the cash across by popping into my local bank. It was all risky as I had never seen the car before, only photos. I organised the shipping myself using a shipper in the States who transported it across land to Jacksonville. The whole shipping process took around 1 month. Arrived mid september 2002.

Why I sold my '89 Firebird
Details coming soon... Back to top

Purchasing the 2000 Pontiac Trans Am from the USA
Details coming soon... Back to top

Importing the Car from the USA
Imported it from the USA which arrived in Southampton docks. Details coming soon... Back to top

SVA Test
Had to get it through the SVA test, without a garage it was getting hard to work in the dark. So it never went in for its SVA test until March 3rd 2003. I had to change the way the front side lights worked and the entire rear light cluster and add some indicator repeaters on the front wings, nothing too major. The SVA retest was on the 13th March which it passed, then I took it straight for the MOT which it also passed, then went to get it registered which took a couple of days, but now it's all taxed and MOT'd, road legal on 13th March 2003. I'm very happy with the car, stunning performance. Back to top

SVA Test

Had to get it through the SVA test, without a garage it was getting hard to work in the dark. So it never went in for its SVA test until March 3rd 2003. I had to change the way the front side lights worked and the entire rear light cluster and add some indicator repeaters on the front wings, nothing too major. The SVA retest was on the 13th March which it passed, then I took it straight for the MOT which it also passed, then went to get it registered which took a couple of days, but now it's all taxed and MOT'd, road legal on 13th March 2003. I'm very happy with the car, stunning performance.
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LED Tube Under Car Lighting
What would you buy? Neons? Cheap or Quality LED Lighting? There are a few forms of under car lighting. I have opinions on all, at the end of the day its only an opinion and may not be the right lighting for you. Since July 2002 a prototype of LED tube lighting from www.led-tubes.com has been fitted to the car. The LED's are like 12mm apart and encased in a 2mm thick polycarbonate tube, many high grade LED's all in one area produce an extreme amount of light, I have seen other LED tube lights with 1 LED every 40mm the light barely bounces off the floor, the LED's arn't even that bright, they look like a real waste of money, so be aware when buying LED tubes, make sure you check the distance between LED's and check the specification of the LED's used, they should give a reading in mcd, the ones on www.led-lights.co.uk are over 5000mcd, the budget LED tubes we have seen are nearer to 400mcd. Make sure he tubing is polycarbonate, it is the type used in riot shields, if its good enougth to deflect bullets then its good enougth to deflect stones flicking up. The tubes have some flexability, not alot but if you bend a neon tube a little then that's it, the glass tube smashes (even is it encased in plastic), there is no way of fixing a neon tube. Why are neon tubes called neon tubes? Only the red ones are Neon, Argon gas producing blues. It seems to be a trade name, people talk to me about the tubes on my car, they call them Neon's even when they are LED's. < Fitting the tubes was easy. Drilled a few holes covered the hole with rust preventer and then used the self tapers that come with the tubes to secure them to the car. Beware of cables running down the inside of the car, I found some when drilling in with a mains drill and no jack, so movement under the car was tight, not the ideal situation when you see smoke coming from the end of the drill bit and you find you drilled right through the main wiring loom to the rear of the car. I was meaning to check for cables before I started. Saw some running down the other side, didn't expect them to be running down both sides. The wiring loom seems to be the same running down both sides, perhaps its redundancy. One of the tubes that I wanted to fit at the rear was a little too long, so out come a hacksaw and cut it to suit, resealed the end of the tube and put the end cap on. Thats a good thing about these tubes, they can be cut to length, the end caps give you 360 degree rotation. The end caps also look great, although under the car people wont see but you know they are good quality. Will get some in the engine bay eventually. Back to top

LED Tube Under Car Lighting

What would you buy? Neons? Cheap or Quality LED Lighting?

There are a few forms of under car lighting. I have opinions on all, at the end of the day its only an opinion and may not be the right lighting for you.

Since July 2002 a prototype of LED tube lighting from www.led-tubes.com has been fitted to the car. The LED's are like 12mm apart and encased in a 2mm thick polycarbonate tube, many high grade LED's all in one area produce an extreme amount of light, I have seen other LED tube lights with 1 LED every 40mm the light barely bounces off the floor, the LED's arn't even that bright, they look like a real waste of money, so be aware when buying LED tubes, make sure you check the distance between LED's and check the specification of the LED's used, they should give a reading in mcd, the ones on www.led-lights.co.uk are over 5000mcd, the budget LED tubes we have seen are nearer to 400mcd. Make sure he tubing is polycarbonate, it is the type used in riot shields, if its good enougth to deflect bullets then its good enougth to deflect stones flicking up. The tubes have some flexability, not alot but if you bend a neon tube a little then that's it, the glass tube smashes (even is it encased in plastic), there is no way of fixing a neon tube. Why are neon tubes called neon tubes? Only the red ones are Neon, Argon gas producing blues. It seems to be a trade name, people talk to me about the tubes on my car, they call them Neon's even when they are LED's.

Fitting the tubes was easy. Drilled a few holes covered the hole with rust preventer and then used the self tapers that come with the tubes to secure them to the car. Beware of cables running down the inside of the car, I found some when drilling in with a mains drill and no jack, so movement under the car was tight, not the ideal situation when you see smoke coming from the end of the drill bit and you find you drilled right through the main wiring loom to the rear of the car. I was meaning to check for cables before I started. Saw some running down the other side, didn't expect them to be running down both sides. The wiring loom seems to be the same running down both sides, perhaps its redundancy.
One of the tubes that I wanted to fit at the rear was a little too long, so out come a hacksaw and cut it to suit, resealed the end of the tube and put the end cap on. Thats a good thing about these tubes, they can be cut to length, the end caps give you 360 degree rotation. The end caps also look great, although under the car people wont see but you know they are good quality. Will get some in the engine bay eventually.
Back to top

Diagnostic / Tuning Tools
A great thing about the LS1 engines is the tuning side of it is all done in the ECU. You really need to be geared up with a laptop and some great software to achive this. I purchased AutoTap Auto Tap/ got the enhanced version for the LS1 engine Auto Tap's EFI Live software. Its great for data looging and reporting error codes, many things you can check for manual or automatic cars. This told me about a vaccum leak not in so many words but did point me towards the problem so it could be fixed. Done some looging when going down Thorney Island drag strip, video of the car from a spectators view, can be seen here. 12mb AVI / MPEG Up against a Nissan Skyline V6 Twin turbo with NOS, well not sure if he used NOS down the strip, but he done the Fast and Furious NOS purge before the race. Great to have a bit of American muscle throbbing with power at low RPM. Next time will try to change into 4th gear, was in 3rd at 101mph, well was at 100 about 50 meters before the end. The silly thing is I set the rev limit to 6000rpm, this means its starts taking out cylinders about 5500 rpm. 6000rpm in 3rd = 100mph. The rev limit was set by another piece of software I have by HP Tuners, available at hptuners this enables you to change stuff in your ECU. First thing to go was the speed limiter. Next was the CAGS (Computer Aided Gear Selection) its a reall pain in the butt, happiliy pulling away on a roundabout in 1st gear between 15mph and 20mph, time to change gear, but think again, is only locks you out of 2nd 3rd and 4th, duh!, whats the use? apparently meant for fuel economy, but not so good when car is coming towards to and your coasting to a stand till. I used to end up in 5th gear, it was the only one I could get into. Considering 5th gear takes you over 160mph, its not really geared up for accleration at 15mph. Back to top

Diagnostic / Tuning Tools

A great thing about the LS1 engines is the tuning side of it is all done in the ECU. You really need to be geared up with a laptop and some great software to achive this. I purchased AutoTap Auto Tap/ got the enhanced version for the LS1 engine Auto Tap's EFI Live software. Its great for data looging and reporting error codes, many things you can check for manual or automatic cars. This told me about a vaccum leak not in so many words but did point me towards the problem so it could be fixed. Done some looging when going down Thorney Island drag strip, video of the car from a spectators view, can be seen here.

12mb AVI / MPEG Up against a Nissan Skyline V6 Twin turbo with NOS, well not sure if he used NOS down the strip, but he done the Fast and Furious NOS purge before the race.

Great to have a bit of American muscle throbbing with power at low RPM. Next time will try to change into 4th gear, was in 3rd at 101mph, well was at 100 about 50 meters before the end. The silly thing is I set the rev limit to 6000rpm, this means its starts taking out cylinders about 5500 rpm. 6000rpm in 3rd = 100mph. The rev limit was set by another piece of software I have by HP Tuners, available at hptuners this enables you to change stuff in your ECU. First thing to go was the speed limiter. Next was the CAGS (Computer Aided Gear Selection) its a reall pain in the butt, happiliy pulling away on a roundabout in 1st gear between 15mph and 20mph, time to change gear, but think again, is only locks you out of 2nd 3rd and 4th, duh!, whats the use? apparently meant for fuel economy, but not so good when car is coming towards to and your coasting to a stand till. I used to end up in 5th gear, it was the only one I could get into. Considering 5th gear takes you over 160mph, its not really geared up for accleration at 15mph.
Back to top

Future Modifications
At first I thought there would be no need for modifications, in fact they still isn't a need, but more of an urge to have silly amounts of power to make this WS6 fly. Already the land speed record for me in this car is 163mph, yes the speedo went off the clock and I had to rely on the GPS to tell me what I was doing, 5600 rpm in 5th and didn't have the guts to remove one hand from the steering wheel to select 6th gear. Not sure if 6th would have pulled and more, I guess I will never find out, no more land speed records for me. After having this car for over 2 years now I'm starting to think what can I do to this car to make it accelerate better than 4.5 seconds to 60mph. There is a whole load of things to increase the BHP or ft/lb torque, but I use this car as an everday car needs to remain reliable. Cosmetical Modifications One thing I like the look off isn't a performance modification but a bit of dressing up, provided by Wingswest in the states I could have the car looking like this.... Wings West Trans-Am on their website. I need to get the front bumper of the car resprayed not because of scratches but its starting to not match the right front wing, the other side is fine, it could be the sun fading one part faster than the other, although both are plastic it could be different types of plastic. Most of the car is plastic / fibre glass apart from the rear quarters being metal. Performance Modifications I beleive Thunder Racing http://www.thunderracing.com have everything you could ever need for modifying a Firebird Trans-Am and many other cars. Such an easy and informative website to use, you selet the car you have and it only shows parts that will fit that car. There are many other sites that do parts for these cars, I always go back to Thunder Racing. Back to top

Future Modifications

At first I thought there would be no need for modifications, in fact they still isn't a need, but more of an urge to have silly amounts of power to make this WS6 fly. Already the land speed record for me in this car is 163mph, yes the speedo went off the clock and I had to rely on the GPS to tell me what I was doing, 5600 rpm in 5th and didn't have the guts to remove one hand from the steering wheel to select 6th gear. Not sure if 6th would have pulled and more, I guess I will never find out, no more land speed records for me.
After having this car for over 2 years now I'm starting to think what can I do to this car to make it accelerate better than 4.5 seconds to 60mph. There is a whole load of things to increase the BHP or ft/lb torque, but I use this car as an everday car needs to remain reliable.

Cosmetical Modifications

One thing I like the look off isn't a performance modification but a bit of dressing up, provided by Wingswest in the states I could have the car looking like this....

Wings West Trans-Am on their website.

I need to get the front bumper of the car resprayed not because of scratches but its starting to not match the right front wing, the other side is fine, it could be the sun fading one part faster than the other, although both are plastic it could be different types of plastic. Most of the car is plastic / fibre glass apart from the rear quarters being metal.

Performance Modifications
I beleive Thunder Racing http://www.thunderracing.com have everything you could ever need for modifying a Firebird Trans-Am and many other cars. Such an easy and informative website to use, you selet the car you have and it only shows parts that will fit that car. There are many other sites that do parts for these cars, I always go back to Thunder Racing.

Back to top