I owned a couple of NA's and a Couple of Turbo's but now im looking at buying a 5L Calais..... What do they go like? Please any info would be appreciated!

with a decent tune they go pretty good, on my berlina i had big air filter, extractors, 2.5 inch exhaust with the centre of the cat knocked out and a pipe put in there, i rebuillt the carby and if you know anyone who knows about them they can show you a few quick mods you can do to the carby, get it dyno tuned and your laughing, mine used to be quicker than some injected 5.0lts.

They're just like any other 5 litre, they have good potential once opened up. when holden released the VL 5.0ltr they had to meet strict emmissions laws so they were corked up hence the 122KW from factory. The reason they arent quick stock is the tall diff ratio (3.08), lazy stall converter (1900RPM), and also from the restricted motor which had the low comp of 8.8:1, a baby cam, about 3 emmission systems that were very restrictive plus the low factory static timing of 6 degrees advance. All these add up to a slow car. But they have a strong diff, the strongest of the trimatics (M40), the big L34 valve heads and also a great Rochester carb that was very good. Since all this crap was put out from factory the whole car repsonds very well to any mods you do. For example my calais has 3.45 LSD, 2800 stall, shift kit, 226 crane cam, pacemakers and exhaust, eldelbrock intake which I put most on myself and the car should run flat 14's maybe a touch quicker, which is decent for the cost of mods all up (about 3500). I wouldnt stick with the 5ltr to go all out in power unless you want to stroke it or add some forced induction, but for an everyday car they can be made to pull quite decent and also the VL 5ltr has the advantage over most 5ltr injection cars in terms of weight, carrying less than roughly 200kg or so which helps alot.

Well last of the carby V8 Commodores. In my opinion the best sounding V8. Nothing better than hearing the carby opening up and sucking in as much air as it can. Yes, you will need to spend some dollars to get some decent power - but a worthy investment, into a classic car ! Good luck

Some good info there vlcalais8. My plans are defintely the exhaust and headers, then I'll be looking at the diff if the funds allow, then I'll look at the stall converter, possibly the cam and look into what can be done with the compression if anything later on.