[s-cars] Da Green Monstah be Rollin... Long

[Hap Maguire]

What a great day for the dyno. Cool moist air. A bunch of great guys to hang with. And just about the greatest car to play with all rolled into one afternoon. First of all, thanks have to go out to Lucas Guadagni the owner of CarZ Performance in Lakewood, CO and his able tech Nathan. Thanks for handling my car with your usual level of careful care. Next, I'd like to thank Brendan Rudak and Colin of Apikol for doing a great job of tuning the 034 EFI. Brendan also gets more thanks for all the feet of weld beads he's laid on my car over the years and all of the cumulative engineering he has done with none other than that Crazy Welshman, Dave "Tufty" Jones. A lot of the "Think Tank" mentalizing on the build of this car happened in Tufty's office at S-Line Motorsport with Tufty, Brendan and me going over the infinite details of putting together this type of car.

For those who don't know or who've forgotten, we left you at the dyno several months ago with the car pulling about 500hp or so on 19 lbs of boost from wastegate spring pressure only. The reason for spring pressure only was that the WGFV we were using couldn't give us a lower break-in boost level. After logging some 1500 miles and a fresh oil change, we were ready for Tufty to install a new and stronger stepper motor to control the boost along with the 034 EFI. I had delivered the car to Brendan earlier in the week so he could do more street tuning and load the first tank of Corn juice and make the appropriate tuning adjustments for the extra fuel required when running the E-85. He brought the car down from Boulder and it was strapped to the Superflow dyno. 

The first pull was on the same spring pressure only and the car put down 522hp with 404tq at 22 lbs of boost. Somehow in transitioning to the E-85 we picked up a few extra pounds. Oh well, that's been the story of my life. After a few more pulls to make sure he was moving the program in the right direction, Brendan dialed up the timing and leaned the mixture a little and the car put down 578hp/442tq with the very same 22 lbs of boost. OK, at this point Brendan was a little concerned because at our base fuel pressure we were at 80% duty cycle on the 880cc injectors. As he would soon be ramping up the boost pressure, we were gonna run out of injector before we ran out of boost. 

More mad conferring was going on and the decision was made to ramp up the fuel pressure by 1.5 bars. Now with the Mondo-sized fuel pump that Mr. Jones had specced, this was not a problem at all. Up went the fuel pressure and we had to make a few more pulls to allow Brendan to back off the mixture to keep us from running too rich. After getting back to basically we were before the fuel pressure increase, Brendan set about increasing boost pressure. Oops, that was too high and Lucas cuts off the run before the boost went too crazy. Same thing happens two more times until we get a run at a decent 28 lbs of boost. Now it takes about one minute for the Superflow computer to spit out the run file and that can just be the longest minute ever. The results finally come across and its 619.9hp/521.9tq but the mixture is a little rich at 11.3 with boost at 29.7 lbs. Brendan makes a few more adjustments and its 622.7hp/509.4 at 11.4 A/F with 28.7 lbs. He finally settles in at 28.4 lbs giving us 634.6hp/521.9tq at 11.5 A/F with the injectors maxed out. 

The BIG question you all probably have is, "Is there more Hap?" Yes, there is more and we're gonna go for it. Everything you do with a car is inherently a compromise. If we go for a bigger injector to run the E-85 at higher boost levels, that can possibly put us into a degredated  run profile when we run 100 or even 91 octane. We think that with 1200 or possibly 1400 injectors we can get the car to 670hp and that's as far as I want to go. Why not stop here and call it a day? Well, if we did that and with the injectors maxed out we wouldn't have any head room. By going to larger injectors, tuning at that level and then backing off to say 28 lbs, I'll be running the car at about 80% and going easy on her. 

By the way, my Beeg FMIC with the NOS serpentine spray bar performed magnificently all day. Brendan had been doing some initial tuning on a far out built 2.7 B5 S4 right before my car and noticed a huge difference in I/C performance. The B5, equipped with the largest SMICs available and pushing the new Tial 770 kit for turbos, would see about a 15 degree IAT rise through a run. I should mention that this car did not have H2O/Methanol injection but after seeing what my car did, it will. My car on the other hand would see the IATs drop during each run. With and without the NOS. Now that is impressive. As far as dynamic impressions, I love my too loud exhaust. I've lost most of my hearing anyway so I just may leave that alone. The car was remarkably smooth as the power ramped up on the dyno. Lucas remarked several times that he couldn't believe how smooth the car felt and he feels a lot of high powered cars on is dyno. It's a very good thing that Lucas and Nathan had my car strapped down good cause Da Monstah wanted to just climb right over those rollers. The other thing that was climbing was the motor itself. Even with all the trick motor and tranny mounts we were still seeing the motor want to climb out of the engine bay. Dave is gonna be working with Brendan in the not too distant future to come up with a Drive Train Stabilizer, DTS, similar to those for the B5 1.8s and 2.7s to help combat this issue.

As far as driving impressions, I don't have any. I was headed to the airport and Brendan has a few more tweeks to accomplish including cold start with the E-85 so the hands on aspect of the car will have to wait a few days. I am in fact typing this at 36,000 ft on my way to SoCal. And, if I haven't mentioned it yet, I really love this car. Once again, thanks to Tufty Jones for bringing my dream to a reality. Colin took lots of pics and video and I know that Brendan downloaded all the dyno runs. Those should be posted soon. I gotta go to bed so I can take my grandsons to Disneyland tomorrow.

Hap, wit dakine dyno time not from Evahboost, Maguire