Hi guys, so this update is loooooong overdue and I apologize to those of you who regularly follow the car. But a lack of updates doesn't mean the car has been sitting around doing nothing
In fact since my last update the car has been to another 10+ track events and time attack events and the turbo has been through 20+ track days at this point. This equates to a lot of development insights that I'm happy to share with you today (both good and bad).
First of all, I am still running on the original engine and I want to credit @
Evasive Motorsports for a solid tune that I wanted geared for hard track days. While it doesn't set any dyno queen numbers for epeen records, it's been very reliable up to this point. We haven't had any catastrophic incidents despite running it quite hard to multiple track records for the platform. However, that's not to say we haven't had any issues.
The DI seal issue reared its ugly head and I had all 4 seals replaced early this year and I've also had to replace the cylinder 1 ignition coil. While I had early signs of both starting to go before the turbo ever went on (i.e. misfire and ignition coil CELs) they both gave up after the turbo was on so neither was covered by warranty as expected.
Beyond those two problems, the main issue we've been tackling is adequately cooling the car. As many of you with turbo experience might know, the front mount for a turbo is not ideal for avoiding heat soak. @
CSG Mike had run the car for multiple events and noticed that in the straights the car wouldn't pull much harder than a stock S2K after a couple sessions despite the initial dyno from Evasive showing much more power than a stock S2K would. So we took the car to a couple other dynos and had some testing done. First up, we have dyno runs on a Dynapak dyno at Church Automotive on 100 octane.
As you can see Dynapaks read quite high in comparison to other dynos but this is roughly what we expected compared to Evasive's mustang dyno. We didn't see a parasitic loss here so at our next stop with European Auto Source's Dynojet we secured time for multiple runs back to back with a closed hood and a single fan to simulate the car in motion:
So what you see here is the power on the first run when everything was cool and on a DynoJet vs. power after 6 runs at high rpm's. The whp in cool conditions again corroborate the Evasive numbers but the 40whp loss after 6 runs was eye opening. On track we suspect the car is losing even more power after multiple sessions and the main culprit appears to be the intake ambient temperature (IAT). As you can see there's a direct correlation in this graph:
Now keep in mind this is probably something that daily driven cars will never really experience. This type of heat soak is from sustained high RPMs for extended periods of time. On track this will be up to 20-25mins of 5-7k RPMs during the entire session. (Although in hot summer months this can happen more naturally.)
Another hint that the engine bay was getting too hot was what happened to my stock fans...
We're not 100% sure if the melting caused the fans to stop or if the fans blew a fuse and the lack of pulled air caused the fans to melt. But either way things were getting too hot in there >.< The stock fans are wired across the center of the fans and the proximity to the turbo exhaust manifold may have caused them to melt as well. So as a result, we decided to upgrade to higher flow Spal fans, a radiator shroud from @
Carolina Dyno and rewiring the fans along the bottom of the engine bay rather than across the center.
Despite having to use the lower profile versions of these fans to fit in with the turbo kit, simply put they are incredible. They can drop coolant temps 15 degrees in about 10 seconds and if you have a gauge to monitor the temps, it's fascinating to see how quickly they work.
Sadly even with the fan upgrades the Robispec radiator solution has failed me twice now. The first one developed a leak earlier this year after about 4 months of tracking and after taking it back to get checked out Robi suspected that there was electrolysis going on in the radiator which caused the leak. So we replaced it and another 4 months later, the 2nd radiator has fully cracked. Granted the ambient temps have been gradually rising in these 4 months but it would appear the radiator isn't sufficient to handle the temps generated by this turbo kit.
So that brings us to today. I'm now looking at a Koyo radiator and Greddy oil cooler solution and we should have some data to look over in the coming months. Robi may still be right about the electrolysis though and I'm going to get my electric system diagnosed soon to see if we have anything excessively drawing power.