Thursday, August 02, 2007

Fun-filled dyno day...

Continuing the Valentine's Day tune... the same car went on to make 465 HP on the same dyno in March.

Somewhere between then and now, the car had new mods. ;)

Today was the day we found out just how effective they were. And this time we went to a Dyno Dynamics dyno, which reads notoriously low. A stock 2007 2.5L STI driven straight from the showroom will read 210 PS at wheels on this.

So the car is set up on the dyno and a small crowd gathers. The operator makes the base run and the line goes off the charts. No kidding. The operator has to rescale it to the 500 PS range and it shows 422 PS at wheels. Double that of a stock STI.

Next I get to work trying to bring up the mid-range and upper end... then we run into problems. It seems the injectors are running out of flow at the top, so it's back to the workshop to swap out for 950cc injectors.

After some time and it's back on the dyno. We make another base pull and now it's down to 310 PS at wheels. DAMN! The owner almost had a heart attack... :> He thought the momentary lean condition earlier in the day had hurt the engine.

So I get right to work with the new injectors... and in the next run the car immediately makes 422 PS again. That's how accurate this dyno is. We make a total of 16 pulls and it was accurate down to 0.1 PS every single time. Eventually we had to stop because the clutch was starting to slip... but it was a fruitful day since we managed to bring up the mid-range by 60+ PS at wheels... all this on 1.6 bar boost and 98 RON.

418 PS at wheels
Click for larger view of the actual dyno sheet.

Here is the same data of the run but re-formatted as an Excel graph. With the wider x-axis the drop-off from peak torque does not appear as exaggerated. And this is where things get interesting: a reflashed Evo 9 does between 305 PS to 315 PS at 6500; this car is doing that at just 4700 RPM! From 4500 to 5000 RPM, the car gains an additional 108.8 PS at wheels! :) The torque stays above 460 Nm between 4750 to 6500. So when this car gets a full head of steam, it doesn't let up because the gear ratios are right on the money.

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