Engine performance
 

Possibly looking to rebuild the 3.8 in my monte carlo soon. It's the 3800 series 2 motor actually came from a buick but from my understanding there the same block? Well, anyway. What has everyone used for camshafts, looking for a little more horsepower, without going the route of a supercharger.... or, what's everyone done to their 3800 to get the most power? I'm open to any ideas, currently the motor has 190k on it. Nothing internal has been replaced that I can think of. I keep oil changes up to date. Currently i do have a misfire on cylinder 5 and my o2 sensors are shot. Only upgrades I've done are a cold air intake. Any info appreciated. Not looking to get trashed. I'm not familiar with these motors.

3800s came in a ton of different cars - Pontiacs, Chevy, Buick, etc. Personally, I wouldn't spend the money to rebuild when there are a zillion NA 3800s in junkyards. You could swap in 2 or 3 junkyars engines for the cost of a proper rebuild.

Not a lot of great options for NA cams to be honest. The problem is that these engines dont respond well to NA mods. Head flow is poor, compression is low, displacement is relatively small, etc. Many of the old NA power records were at or just over 200 wheel horsepower. To put that into context, a stock supercharged 3800 makes about 200 wheel horsepower. A modern, stock 2.0L turbo will generally make that or even a little more.

The other hard part is the price for a 'big' cam. To run a big cam, you'd want to do heads and a converter too. So you end up with $2k+ in mods and poor drivability for something that likely will never get to 300 crank horsepower.

If you were dead set on doing an NA cam, I'd stick in a ZZP GT1 and be done. It wont make anywhere near the best power, but itll work fine with stock heads and stock converter.

For the 'most power', you're going to need a power adder- supercharger, turbo, or spray.

Granted, I wouldn't do anything on a 200k engine beyond basic maintenance.