ProMAX Level 4

[sawood12]

But however, and I know I've said it before, the biggest problem with high power 944's is that you can't get the power down. The big HP jap cars tend to be 4wd (not to mention a hell of alot heavier than the 944) which can handle much much high power, my tail end can get a bit light, even in the dry at my measly power levels. OK I could improve things by fitting larger tyres, LSD etc but you can't get around the fact that 300 - 350flywheel bhp is probably the max power that is usable and drivable. Anything above that is simply rolling road tit for tat.

From the handful of trackdays i've been on it's the Jap stuff that spends more time spinning off the track than anything. This is because the fancy 4wd stability and traction control systems divorces 'feel' from the driver lulls them into a false sense of security and when they eventually loose it (and they usually do) they are so far beyond the capabilities of the chassis and even further beyond the capabilities of the drivers that it is only going to end one way - on the grass or the gravel. I've driven scooby's and evo's and am not impressed at all. Yes their cornering speeds are immense but the feel of the cars is so dull, they don't give me any smiles per mile. Driving the 944 at 30mph gives me more of a buzz than driving a scooby or Evo at twice that speed. It's just not my bag. Jap stuff is for the Playstation generation who are not interested in the skill of driving at all, they want their cars to mimick the world they truly feel comfortable in - cyberspace. I'm surprised i've not seen a mod that replaces the steering wheel and foot pedals with a Playstation controller, and the windscreen with a Plasma Screen display.

 

[nick_968]

Try KW suspension and you will get the power down, its also about tuning for good power delivery rather than a big bang as the turbo comes on song. My 968 running 255's and KW is not near its traction limit with 375hp, once I hit 450hp I will report back to see if it suffers at those levels. The tuning is less than ideal at present so maybe it will suffer once it is all optimised, I can only wait and see.

Going back to the liners versus standard block, with early sleeved solutions the problem was often with movement of the sleeves, I presume the reinforcement around the top is there to stop this happening and also strengthen what could be a weakness in the standard block design. But on the later 3.0 blocks (968) the cylinders are siamesed and have webbing reinforcement cast in to strengthen them. As for running high boost, you will not get much longevity running much over 22 psi on a bigger engine 3.0 or 3.2. Even with 22psi you want to have some serious intercooling to keep temps under control. Just turning up the boost is not the right way to make more power. You need to work on the air in and air out of the engine to optimise the boost you are making. If you harmonise all the parts to flow perfectly together i.e. traditional tuning, then you will have a good setup and hopefully a reliable one that will give good service. The 9xx/ SPS engine is by far the best solution I have seen so far and will provide the best starting point for any serious hp engine bar none if you want performance and factory reliability.

 

[sawood12]

Nick, I have got KW's and granted i've only had them for a couple of months or so now and havn't had a chance to really explore the increased capabilities I have noticed the car feels a hell of alot more grippy and planted and has given me more confidence. However I think the M3 vs. RS4 just goes to show the advangates of 4wd once you get upto and over 400bhp. Ultimately it's all about rubber on tarmac and ultimately the more driiven rubber you have in contact with the tarmac the more drive you can lay down.

My main reservations of liners in engines is that the piston expands at a different rate to the liner so you often get a bit of a rattly engine until it warms up and everything sizes correctly together. I know that this is all probably taken into account and there is plenty of experiance to show that this is not detremental to the longevity of the enigne but it just doesn't seem right, and utilising the technology on race cars is fine where the proportion of the time the engine is running engine cold is alot less than on a road car.

 

[nick_968]

Not a fan of 4wd personally your carrying too much unecessary weight, give me a 944/68 anyday, failing that a RWD 911. GT2 manages fine with big hp and torque, albeit with the engine in the back to help out. With the 3.2 the liners are nicasil coated so you dont get the tolerance/ expansion problems you get with steel liners.

 

[333pg333]

Well the liners can move but are unlikely if the process of fitting them is done perfectly and if they have pinned the girdle etc. I'm not neccessarily advocating running major boost but nowdays 22psi is really not a lot. As for just turning up the boost to increase power rather than doing other mods, that's what you first do when you have a boost controller. It is often a short lived experiment. I'm talking about modifying or custom intakes, custom t-body, larger i/c pipes and custom front mount i/c. Then you can run water and don't forget about race fuel/ maps. So, yes as you know it can be done but it's all a matter of how deep your pockets are v's your desires. The V8 thing is seriously worth considering, but I am still somehow linked with the car as a total Porsche item. Hmm 928 GTS motor, now your talking. What, did someone say supercharged, Ooohh dear there we go again. lol

As for traction, with the KW's, some decent big rubber, and a proper LSD, traction shouldn't be an issue. LSD is vital here, it really makes a lot of difference.

 

[eastendr]

ORIGINAL: sawood12

But however, and I know I've said it before, the biggest problem with high power 944's is that you can't get the power down. The big HP jap cars tend to be 4wd (not to mention a hell of alot heavier than the 944) which can handle much much high power, my tail end can get a bit light, even in the dry at my measly power levels. OK I could improve things by fitting larger tyres, LSD etc but you can't get around the fact that 300 - 350flywheel bhp is probably the max power that is usable and drivable. Anything above that is simply rolling road tit for tat.

Can't say I can agree with that!

Like all things if tyres and suspension setup is good, LSD is working etc traction is not a problem at all. I don't suffer any traction problems the right side of 400 BHP, so less than that was definately not an issue (as Fen would say - P6000's could give traction issues at 4 BHP [] - for example).

You can tune for maximum peak power or for drivability. WUF will carry 28MPH in 5th and a reasonable torque curve for the size of turbo fitted. The next stage of the discussion would be adjustable boost control - pointless when god gave you a right foot ...

Good that some have made the point about making sure the chassis, and particularly brakes, are uprated to cope. This applies to tuning 944's as much as it did to any car over the last ?00 years. Develop all aspects in equilibrium or face (un)expected consequences.

There are cheap horsepower. There are reliable horseposer. There are high horsepower. Unfortunately, they don't go together. You cannot make the triangle meet. Choose any two sides of the triangle !!

Interesting thread !

 

[John Sims]

ORIGINAL: eastendr

.........There are cheap horsepower. There are reliable horseposer. There are high horsepower. Unfortunately, they don't go together. You cannot make the triangle meet. Choose any two sides of the triangle !!

Ah! Cannell san have much wisdom and not speak the words of young boys. []

 

[Neil Haughey]

ORIGINAL: John Sims

ORIGINAL: eastendr

.........There are cheap horsepower. There are reliable horseposer. There are high horsepower. Unfortunately, they don't go together. You cannot make the triangle meet. Choose any two sides of the triangle !!

Ah! Cannell san have much wisdom and not speak the words of young boys. []

DIY is the only way to do it cheap. You end up looking like a right twonk when it all goes wrong though.

 

[Fen]

Not sure I agree. Doing it truly DIY you can spend a lot of money chasing performance only to find it didn't work for some reason.

Cribbing someone else's R&D and doing the spannering yourself on the other hand is cheaper.

 

[Riverside]

ORIGINAL: Neil Haughey

DIY is the only way to do it cheap. You end up looking like a right twonk when it all goes wrong though.

I think if you do it yourself & you make a mistake you might feel like a fool for 'wasting' time & money, but making mistakes is part of the learning curve. Come back stronger & wiser, anyone that belittled your mistakes will feel a fool themselves.

Personally I would argue that trying to get huge power from a cheap car rather than just buying a new car designed to do the job is 'cheap power'. We all sit along the power vs cost line somewhere. It's fun if you can afford it, frustrating if you can't []

 

[Neil Haughey]

ORIGINAL: Fen

Not sure I agree. Doing it truly DIY you can spend a lot of money chasing performance only to find it didn't work for some reason.

Cribbing someone else's R&D and doing the spannering yourself on the other hand is cheaper.

Personally I have never really considered road car tuning to be R&D, there is very little risk compared to for example inventing something new only to find later that it doesn't really work. IMHO ppl that get it badly wrong by and large don't know what they are doing. Different if talking about race engine tuning where you might be looking for a 2% gain.

Best place to get hints / ideas from is what the car manufacturers and the elite end of the market race engine tuners themselves do and compare with similar engines.

True about costs getting out of hand due to design changes but IMHO this is still cheaper then paying someone else. My old Saab was a case where I tried 3 different pipe and hose diameter combinations for the IC inlet / exhaust pipe work between the turbo and the engine. All where based on calculations I had done about the flow rate I was expecting to handle, and kits for other cars. Guess what I was better off not copying other ppl. The off the shelf hard pipe kits for other cars tended to increase the pipe diameter far to much. The lesson I learned is trust your own intuition and what you can pick up from people that really know what they are talking about, read all the books and ignore 90% of the car tuning world.

Also it is a lot of fun trying things out you get a real buzz when it works well and for me this can't be matched by handing over a big wedge of cash for someone else to have all the fun.

 

[Fen]

I don't disagree with any of that and I have been pretty vocal in the past regarding some tuners and the levels of R&D they have not put into products they sell, but I'd rather have the best end result regardless of how it's achieved and therefore either I buy something that I believe to be the best available from a third party or I accept that I'll spend money on having something tested and potentially retested multiple times - which all costs money.

I've done both (plus plagiarism) and I will continue to do so. For example if I go with a Porsche engine in my 944 again it will probably be an SPS/9xx one which is buying what I believe to be the most developed product available and the culmination of a programme of development I would not have wanted to fund personally. On the other hand it will run with Autronic SM4 management (when I still believe mine is the only 944T in the world to have ever run it) that I would expect to cost a fair bit in bespoke mapping and it will use a coil on plug ignition I copied from Rick.

 

[Neil Haughey]

ORIGINAL: Fen

I've done both (plus plagiarism) and I will continue to do so. For example if I go with a Porsche engine in my 944 again it will probably be an SPS/9xx one which is buying what I believe to be the most developed product available and the culmination of a programme of development I would not have wanted to fund personally. On the other hand it will run with Autronic SM4 management (when I still believe mine is the only 944T in the world to have ever run it) that I would expect to cost a fair bit in bespoke mapping and it will use a coil on plug ignition I copied from Rick.

Agree Jon is a top bloke that really knows his stuff. You only have to spend 5 minutes with the guy to realise it.

 

[Guest]

ORIGINAL: DivineE

The fastest Jap car I know of thats proven to produce its power is a 600hp skyline that was tested on the rollers of truth at Silverstone! (the engine bought from Japan said it was 850hp but they never got it to run that).

I love this rollers of truth stuff! So does everybody else have the rollers of lies??
As I recall the reason behind the silverstone log was to stop people whinging that somebody elses dyno was reading higher figures . Therefore if everybody used the same dyno you would have consistant figures.
There are many great dyno's around the uk, the two things to check are
Does the dyno read SAE or DIN
How often is the Dyno calibrated and are the certificates present
I think you will find most people in the Porsche community on Rennlist trust Speedforce Racing, have a look at what these guys are getting out of the Jap stuff. Tim is a great guy and ultra honest. He does a lot of great parts for our cars too!
Rollers of truth..... it does make me chuckle! Sounds like a courtroom!

 

[Neil Haughey]

For me it is more an issue with the power curve then if a dyno is giving realistic numbers or not. Can't speak for jap turbo's but cosworth motors seemed to be dead below 5k. The one with 380 Bhp that my brother rebuilt for a friend (sapphire 4 door) was a massive surprise i.e. we expected the dyno to say something like 280 to 300. Out on the road at sensible speeds that car was no quicker then my old Saab 900 which had no more then 230 Bhp but massive torque (believed to be circa 280 lb/ft with full boost below 2k rpm).

This is the thing with massive numbers at high rpm from highly tuned turbo motors. Might be good on the track at 120+ mph but could well be no better then a stock car with a few subtle mods at road speeds.

BTW also worth adding that what a chassis dyno measures as a raw number is extremely accurate, ppl often forget that.

I would like to see how quick all these turbo nutter 951's are up the 1/4 mile at Santa Pod.

 

[Hilux]

Try KW suspension and you will get the power down,

Regardless of the make if a car is well set up it `should` stay level and distribute the weight evenly over the tyre width (especially with cornering) ergo with more power the car will still `feel` planted. It certainlyreduces tyre `roll` and outsides warming too much and feathering. I was amazed at how controllable my car now is and how I can `drift` corners without a sudden snap taking you off, mind you I`m still wary of the LSD and want it rebuilt or ideally a Quaife installed.

I have KWV3 and Weltmeister ARB`s fitted. ARB`s are key to the huge difference in suspension performance. I also suggest that rebuilt Konis et al will still perform better when the body roll is reduced. I make this statement in the context of the near perfect even wear and temperatures on all four tyres that all had equal pressures experienced on track. The tyres had no discernible `worms` on them compared to the original Mo30 set up after being punished on track but instead overheated (evenly) due to their road use type and (being new) the deep tread pattern.

I also feel that with the stiffer suspension you can certainly feel the body flex more (and I made sure I bought a sunroof delete car to ensure a stiff chassis) so I also feel the need for front AND rear turret braces. Mine creaks and groans in places it never used to before.

Good that some have made the point about making sure the chassis, and particularly brakes, are uprated to cope. This applies to tuning 944's as much as it did to any car over the last ?00 years. Develop all aspects in equilibrium or face (un)expected consequences.

I was one that did make that point and agree entirely. Why have brakes that are on their limits when you could (SHOULD) have brakes that are well within their performance parameters for the additional massive kinetic energy increase that can only be lost via heat dissipation.

 

[Riverside]

ORIGINAL: Hilux
Why have brakes that are on their limits when you could (SHOULD) have brakes that are well within their performance parameters for the additional massive kinetic energy increase that can only be lost via heat dissipation.

Unsprung weight.

 

[John Sims]

ORIGINAL: Neil Haughey



..............I would like to see how quick all these turbo nutter 951's are up the 1/4 mile at Santa Pod.

You'd get more of an idea on a track day. 944's are about the whole package - power/handling/brakes. What is the point of going fast in a straight line? []

 

[Riverside]

ORIGINAL: John Sims
What is the point of going fast in a straight line? []

Winning pub arguments about which car is quicker maybe? []

 

[Fen]

I really like the idea of 1/4 miling, but I wouldn't do it in my 944. I'd want something with strong enough transmission.