i'll be there with my car and I think 7 other Porsches from up here. I was a little short on my power goal but don't have enough time to switch hotsides now.

 

Dont you have the hotsides from your old turbo?

 

I do have the other turbos, but I don't have enough time to swap, redyno, test before loading up tomorrow.

 

You still make enough to go over 200mph!

 

Good weekend. Write up coming. I tried but fell asleep at the keyboard! In the mean time, this is pretty cool.


From my 195mph 1/2 mile pass today. vBox read it a little higher for whatever reason (196.x something).

 

Congrats man, living vicariously through you!

 

Had a great weekend out at the Dallas Half Mile! It was really fun to hang out with the AIM crew, they brought the heat with a really impressive fleet of cars. I do mean fleet of cars. Marky Mark and the funky bunch managed a 202mph pass out of his 997, and from the datalog I saw it looked like the Spoolbus was on a 210+ pass before running into issues. As for me, I went ~186 off the trailer on wastegate spring pressure before turning it up. In order to tell the story of the weekend we're going to have to back up a little bit to keep things in context.

As mentioned before, I was planning on running the event with a new set of headers from Unobtainium that locate the turbos in a non-oem location more towards the rear of the car. I wanted to do this for a couple of reasons, to make the turbo position more compatible for extremely large turbos in the future, and because I want to use much larger intake piping and have a more direct path from the compressor housing outlet for air to water intercoolers in the future. Chris at Unobtainium built a really cool mock up fixture and sent it down to Steve Ott at Driversource for position testing before fabbing up the final headers.


Header position mock up from Unobtainium!


This unfortunately didn't turn out the way we expected, and a communication error resulted in them not being moved where we wanted. There was some back and forth between Driversource, Unobtainium, and myself but in the end Steve & Chris worked out how to move forward. Steve texted me that there was a solution, there was much rejoicing, and I didn't worry about it. I should have.

The unknown turbo combination was beginning to take shape, I ultimately decided I wanted to stay with the internal wastegate configuration. I just couldn't get away from the convenient packaging, quiet operation, and emissions legal aspects that make things easy for a great street car. The plan was to go with a 7164 with some updates that Xona Rotor is introducing for the 2019 season. As seems to be a pattern with me, all of the parts did not get finished in time.

It turns out that the solution to the positioning problem was to send my existing headers back to Unobtainium to be used as a reference in order to correct the mock up fixture. If I'd been asked, I would have said absolutely not - do not send out my headers because if the new ones don't get done (I've been down this path before) then we won't be able to put the car back together. Well, to make things more interesting I think everyone forgot about about it because about a week and a half ago when I realized that my headers were in Canada and not in Texas I freaked out. I got a hold of Chris who sent the headers back via DHL Express overnight.

Or at least he tried to. They were shipped out Friday 11/2 and were scheduled to arrive Monday 11/5. I chuckled to myself because "DHL Express Overnight" was really 3 days. That actually would have been fast!Monday rolls around and I notice that my headers are still in Canada and the delivery date gets pushed to Tuesday. Tuesday rolls around and my headers make it to the DHL hub in Cincinnati and enter customs. Thus begins the formation of "**** DHL Racing LLC" and my nightmare. I spent 2-3 hours a day on the phone with DHL at the advice of friends trying to get them pushed through and delivered. On Wednesday night/Thursday morning, after being told lie after lie by DHL Customer Service I had enough of the situation and sent an absolute sob story of an email to the DHL Express USA CEO's email address.


One of the many images I sent in my Email to DHL. This was me at the Dallas half mile in April. I was going for the "I couldn't race earlier this year because I almost tore my leg off" sympathy.


Fast forward a couple of days of being told continously to "call back tomorrow", it's Friday morning people are arriving for the race - and my car is in pieces in Houston 300 miles away. I was basically up all night, couldn't sleep and was really bummed out. I then noted a flight leaving around 5:00am, tail 5Y520 which is the every other day or so flight operated by Atlas Air for DHL from Cincinnati to Houston. Yes, sometimes racing requires you to get an understanding of your shipping "partner" operations in order to understand what is happening. I saw the package get scanned for departure from Cincinnati at the exact (scheduled) departure time for Atlas Air 5Y520 - although the actual flight was delayed about an hour and ten minutes. At this point I was reasonably sure my package was on that flight. I stayed up all night and basically slept about 45 minutes tracking the package, and watching the flight in the air. After it landed I waited about an hour and then called DHL.

"We're sorry sir, there was a ground handling delay and your package did not make the flight. You'll have to call back Monday for an update." To say I was crushed is an understatement. I had planned on being at the New Orleans race (which turned into a total disaster, but that's another story for a different day) and the timeline was totally doable - and somehow while preparing for a race for 4 months I was going to miss not only New Orleans but Dallas too? I decided to do the sane thing, and walked home from my office (Left out of my office, 20-30 steps down the hall) and another left to my bedroom. Laid down, closed my eyes and said "Well, it's just not going to happen."

I'm not even trying to be dramatic, that's when the email arrived. I had just shut my eyes and my phone buzzed. "That can't be DHL.".

It was. It was from the DHL CEO's office handlers.

"Mr. Rix,

On behalf of Greg Hewitt, please accept my sincere apologies and thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will review with the Management Team and let you know what steps we can take to help get this headed in the right direction. As soon as I have further information I will let you know.

Kind Regards,
Ramon
Executive Response"





Approximately 10 minute later:

"Dear Mr. Rix,

Currently I am also working with the Gateway Management Team for updates on the delay to have this shipment moved to the delivery station. As soon as more information is available I will update you.

Kind Regards,
Ramon
Executive Response"


That was a short meeting. 5 minutes later:

"Dear Mr. Rix,

I have received confirmation this will arrive to the local service center in approximately 3 hours and will be loaded for delivery today. I will continue to monitor until delivery has been made.

Kind Regards,
Ramon
Executive Response"

As near as I can tell what happened was that a gust of wind came up in Cincinnati as the hot air blew out of their customer service department, causing my shipment to be blown off the shelf in customs, land on a cart being pushed out the door which then acidentally ran into one of the baggage trains heading for the planes. One of those trains turned too hard to avoid a small furry animal on the runway causing it to tip on two wheels, and my headers fell onto a plane heading to Houston. I know this because I had just spoken to DHL customer service, and was informed that not even God himself could get my package delivered and I should wait until Monday to call.

Steve from Driver Source sent one of his guys out to pick them up, and put the headers/turbos on the car in record time. It was running 6 hours after the headers were picked up from DHL. That includes driving time to get them.


I can't thank those guys enough, I went from saying "**** it, I'm taking the afternoon off and taking a nap" to going racing the next day. It was such a whirlwind I barely had any time to mentally prepare for the race. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you're trying to go 200mph across any distance on the ground you really need to have your wits about you and understand all the moving parts in order to ensure everyone's safety. Steve actually put the car on his personal trailer and caravanned up with fellow forum member Todd (BHT) from Houston the next morning and I met them out at Hensley Airfield the next morning around 9am.

There were certainly the unknowns one has when a car hasn't even been driven in a few months, had a rear tire replaced (nail), dash installed (Motec C127), new front lip, new shifter (2011 GT2RS since I'm a fan), turbos changed, etc. The turbos are probably the biggest part of the story. Xona Rotor has some serious stuff coming out for 2019 that is going to change the game. I will post information about them when I am able to. In November 2017 I ran a best of ~191mph in the half mile, I think there was still some performance on the table with ignition timing and driving, but we had it pretty much turned up all the way. Just keep in mind that my car is running Xona 6564s with an internal wastegate housing -- the .63 A/R housing. Pretty much the smallest combo you can get, and the response is just mental. I went 197mph in the half mile running into the rev limiter in every gear -- because of this:


Integration problems between Syvecs and the Motec dash resulted in having to pull it from the car. It wasn't trivial to remove the mount, the whole steering column had to be taken apart. With time winding down for the first day, we just decided to send it and I'd try to drive by ear.

I couldn't even see the dash! On a normal shift I drop the turbos from about ~140k rpm to 110-115k rpm before they ramp back up. On these shifts the turbos were dropping to ~80k rpm across .3-.4 seconds due to my reaction time of identifying the rev limiter and making the shift. Certainly not how we drew it up on the white board, but when you get DHL'd you have to try to be competitive. Especially when all the other Porsche race cars showing up are so damn fast.

After the extremely successful day on Saturday, I felt great! I thought there was absolutely no way I wouldn't be able to get 200mph on Sunday. It was supposed to be a little warmer than Saturday, and conditions looked great. As we left I snapped a photo of the car sitting next to the Dallas Performance Lamborghinis.


Dusk! That's Amber from FP's new WRX sitting behind me. Really fun car and I love the dark Blue.


I'll post some video and pictures as they come in. Kalem Romero is always reliable to be out at the track in the Texas area to get some great shots!


The center caps are still in my wheels for this pass! Very similar to one of my favorite pictures of my car, which has fire blowing out the exhaust.


Unfortunately I didn't get vBox data for the 197 run, but I did for the 195mph 1/2 run on Sunday. The weather was not as good as was advertised. It was overcast, temperatures in the 40s, and just darn cold. It was not a good day to be out racing at all. To make matters worse, all kinds of cars were going on off-track safaris into the grass -- including some of the other Porsches! It's mentally hard enough on me to run the car, and that's in good conditions. It was blowing off the tires in 1st/2nd pretty good, and the car skated all over the track. I just didn't feel safe anymore, it was too cold and the track was not clean. I decided to park it and live to race another day.


Loaded it up on the trailer. My center caps are gone on the rear HRE wheels . John Bray from Spec told me that is pretty common when you wheel hop, it was just so cold and traction non existent I blew off the tires VERY hard. I was chuckling to myself about that Dallas PD car sitting in the grass. She kept backing up and pulling forward to get a better view of the cars as they went down the track. I was thinking "Not today lady... Not today, it's legal to go 200mph here!"

Here's some vBox data from the 195 run - I *thought* was running the vBox on the 197 run Saturday but when I went to pull the card out it was sitting loose in the slot. Not sure what happened there. Probably user error, maybe the car was just so fast it pulled the card right out of the slot .


0-60, you can see me having to pedal it in first gear pretty heavily to keep things going straight. The most it would pull was about a G, I spun the tires all the way through second gear as well.



60-130, severely traction limited but I think it's still the best 60-130 I've gotten out of the car. Getting really close to the 3's...


1/4 mile. Maybe I'll run a 9 someday.


The full half mile run.


Tomorrow morning I'm taking the car to the dyno and we're going to get some data for the new Xona turbos. Hopefully more soon!

The plan going forward is to get the new headers on the car, open up the air intakes, and possibly put some dual port wastegate actuators on the internally gated turbos. Right now I'm running a 23psi wastegate spring. I'd like to use a dual port actuator so I can run lower boost (especially in first gear!). Depending on how the turbo development goes I may swap from a 6564 to a 7164, that's still up in the air.

All in all it was a very successful weekend. If someone had told me on Wednesday or Thursday that the headers would arrive, the car would get put together, I would get within 2.x mph of my goal, and everyone (including the cars!) goes home safe I would have taken that deal instantly. Whenever you can put your car back in the garage after a weekend of racing in the same condition it came out that's a win right there!


Feeling the win. Glad everyone made it home safe!

 

I always enjoy reading about your adventures. Congrats on an awesome showing and getting home safe.

 

good seeing you down there Dan, you and BHT were solid competition! glad we were all able to make it to an event together.

 

I remember when 200mph in the mile was the thing. Amazing showing for the Porsche community. Looking forward to more developments Rix Next time hand carry the parts across the border

 

Thanks man, I just like to get to meet up with my friends and play cars =).

I got video of the dyno today, I'll get it up on the Youtubes and post soon. Also -- there is some news on the DHL front. You guys are going to get a good laugh out of it, I'm waiting for a couple pictures.

 

It's starting to happen. TiAL just dropped a short video of the new Xona Rotor Ultra High Flow Turbine this evening on Instagram.

This is the 2019 turbo change I was referring to.

I drove it to Dallas Performance this morning (~40 miles from my house) and had the most fun I've ever had driving my car without ever even going above half throttle. I think it actually has better response than the current turbine wheel, and the flow (as the name suggests) is so good you can basically get more flow out of a .63 AR turbine housing with this wheel vs. an .82ar housing with the current part. More flow and more response? Yes please! They actually re-invented the wheel.

Had trouble getting a link to show up, just go to Instagram and look up TiAL.

 

Good to see you too Mark! Agree that it was great to get the cars together at the same event and really show how far the platform has come.

 

Fix 997.1

I admire and congratulate you on your excellent write and and well documented high HP build. Lots of time and effort went into this thank you.
Q: is there in the meantime a complete Fuel delivery system Kit available when running the Magnus Duel Injector set up ? or do I still have to gather all the parts from different vendors ?
pm message me if you like. Heinz Peier , hpeier12@gmail.com

 

There really isn't anything available turn key. I have the SRM brushless fuel pumps, Magnus/ISC dual injector setup, Fuel Lab regulator, Injector Dynamics ID1300 / ID1700 (primary/secondary) injectors, and Injector Dynamics fuel filter. I'm pretty happy with all of it, the SRM brushless controller takes a few seconds to come on, I'd like something instant. I know SRM is working on that though, if it isn't already available - I need to ping Sean. I've been waiting for someone to come up with a full turnkey kit. Perhaps it exists now, but it didn't the last time I looked. The SRM pump kit is pretty inclusive. We used some slightly different lines and fittings for a few things vs. what was included in the kit though.