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I have been quietly working on my car for a few months and thought it was about time for an update.
I had been running stock 997.1 turbos, 997.2 intercoolers, Protomotive/Siemens injectors, Sachs 764 clutch, AMS turbo/compressor inlet pipes, Europipe exhaust, E85 fuel, and Protomotive tuning. The combination was extremely good in my opinion, the car dyno'd nearly 590 to the tires on the Mainline Dyno @ T1 Race Performance in Dallas. It was also running mid 140mph passes at the Runway Rivalry event in Dallas. This is operated on the same track, and conditions as Texas Invitational. The general rule of thumb is that cars run about 10mph quicker here than they do on a 1/4 mile track. The car was probably trapping 133-135mph in the 1/4, but I did not have the vBox at this time so it's all bench racing.
Something you will probably hear me say if you are around me long enough is WNMP - We Need More Power™. I went with big VTG turbos. For those curious I recommend the Champion 68mm upgrade. After getting the turbos bolted up I had some issues getting the tuning done the way I wanted it. I had been very interested in the Cobb platform since it was announced, so I went ahead and ordered a Cobb Accessport and started working with Mitch @ Cobb getting the car tuned.
Almost immediately the injectors I had in the car were discovered to be way too small. I picked up a set of Injector Dynamics ID1300 injectors, and after the world's longest injector install I was back up and running again. Everything you read on here about Mitch @ Cobb is true. The guy never rests, and never gets impatient. He answers emails early in the AM, late in the PM, and everywhere in between. I have the Accesstuner Race software, so I went ahead and set the car up for the new injectors myself with some advice from Mitch. The reason I am such a big fan of Injector Dynamics is they give you real data. The voltage and flow data they provide for their injectors is spot on. There isn't really any guesswork involved. I pretty much just punched in the numbers on a calculator and used the resulting values.
I will post more information about Accesstuner Race in the future, but for now I am letting Mitch run the show. I open the maps that he sends in ATR and follow along with the changes that he is making, but I haven't felt the desire to make any significant changes of my own yet. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on things at this point. In the future I plan on doing some fine tuning, and will share my adjustments. Things like cold start on E85 adjustments over a wider temperature range, etc.
I'm not too into posting and talking about what I'm going to do, so I have kept most of this to myself. However now I have some vBox data to share that I am pretty happy with.
This is the best 60-130 time that I have gotten so far, out of about 4-5 different attempts. I am collecting the data with the new vBox Sport, which samples at 20hz as opposed to 10hz that the older P-Box/Driftbox models ran.
After getting the boost control sorted out with my car, as well as chasing down a few gremlins after the turbo swap I made the above run @ 5.99 seconds 60-130.
Here is the 60-100 for this run.
60-100 graph from the same VBO file containing the 60-130 data.
Now this is where things get interesting. After turning the boost up I started getting an ignition misfire. I am in the process of putting the PRO in procrastinate swapping the spark plugs to hopefully resolve this. You can see the misfire in the 60-130 graph, as the car recovered very slowly from about the 3.0 second to 4.0 second mark, back to a peak of about .6G in 4th gear. That run was on the lower boost setting. I nearly let out in 4th gear when it stumbled but it pulled through it and felt pretty clean the rest of the way.
Here is a 60-100 that I captured with the boost turned up before my spark plugs gave up.
Best 60-100 time to date. It's a solid .3 seconds ahead of my best 60-130...
I've still got a ways to go, but once I get the ignition issues worked out I'll be back with some more data.
Car sounds like it is coming along nicely. I went ahead and dropped in some denso iridium PK20PR-P8s instead of the stock Bosch plugs while my car was down having everything else done. Hoping those will work well for the long haul.
I actually just ended up putting my Europipe back on the car. I want to go with a BBI catless but as well as the car is running with the Europipe I may just stick with it for now.
I had the plugs put in around November of '13, and have driven the car about 4,000 miles during that time. It seems awfully quick to go through a set of spark plugs. I wondered about the Iridium plugs myself - used to run those in my 4G63.
The car moves. I think it's starting to hit the territory that as a driver, you are more holding on than you are letting it suck you back in the seat. I have a hard time knowing how it's running from my butt dyno alone. It is pretty consistent, I have two 60-100's in the 2.5x range, 2.55 and 2.57. I haven't figured out exactly what I'm going to do with the plugs, I question my mental fortitude to swap the plugs myself.
With Cobb's tuning we can tune for larger injectors required for E85. Flex fuel type integration where the car will adjust tuning automatically based on the amount of ethanol in the fuel and having an ethanol fuel sensor in the tank isn't there with a flash only approach at this time. To my knowledge that is only available currently with a standalone.
Sent you a pm on plug I use. Get them and you'll be good to go. It's one step colder , non-gappable plug . Very special and pricey but works good . We tested it up to 26.5psi so far and over 700awhp on corn and pump gas.
We're running with oem plugs and coils without any apparent issues right now at 24-25psi on A3076s with meth. A step colder is always nice but I'm not sure if its really necessary.
Normally I would just buy a few plugs and test them but with as much of a pain the job is on these cars I only want to do this once. Thanks for all the feedback and help guys.
The issue could also be my coils, I would have expected the plugs to last longer. What I'm debating is just going ahead and picking up some BBI or EvoMS coils. With the extra spark energy it will make gapping them tight less of an issue, and I don't want to be changing my plugs every 5k miles either. I have the Denso pk20pr-p8 plugs in it now. I guess I'll have a better answer to that after pulling it apart and inspecting the OEM coils.
The non-OEM plugs may be your issue. I recall from some other threads that was the case. I'm on OEM plugs gapped down and so far no issues - but the car is now in hibernation.
12-20-2014, 03:01 AM
