Afternoon folks, just thought I'd share with you my results of what seems like a long year of hard work, I first fitted my ko4 hybrid to my 212k mile engine back in January of this year, and Niki at R-tech mapped it at the time to a nice and rod friendly 291bhp
Since the day I picked the car up back in February, Niki and I have been talking about sticking rods in it, and bringing it back to see what it can really do.
Finally that day came, and the car was booked into R-tech for a map tweak on Nov 20th.
Since the original 291bhp map, I've built up a new engine, using a 108k block, pistons and head, with the bores honed, new rings, and some DM forged rifle drilled rods. I've also added AEM water methanol injection, and ditched my miltek 2.5'' non res cat back in favour of the gti famous ebay 3'' system.
after just 4k miles, when I pulled the engine, I found the turbo was in fairly poor health, and was fast on it's way to destruction. I gave the turbo to Littco from this forum, who rebuilt it for me with an uprated bearing kit, balanced the whole unit and also replaced a faulty actuator with one of his own 1 bar items.
And then it was time....
R-tech being 130 miles away, I was up early, and had my standard 'day out' breakfast of a hybrid Pasta n Sauce (everything must be hybrid
), 1x Cheese and Broccoli hybridised with 1x Cheese leak and ham pasta n sauce. Properly awesome combo.
And we're off!
All was going well as I headed up the A34, with the car feeling good.
Until I got to oxford and everything just seemed to stop. I was due at R-tech at 0930, so wasn't too impressed with this:
Quick stop in a petrol station for another coffee
I arrived at R-tech at 09:35, and went to drive up onto the ramp, only to find my splitter caught the ramp and it wouldn't go on, so the bumper had to come off:
And onto the ramp it went:
Trying to load the car onto the dyno, it was sitting FAR too low in the rollers, so really annoyingly, after checking all the corner weights just the day before, I had to raise the coilovers at the front to be able to get it strapped down properly
I took measurements, and will reset the coilovers to the same height as near as I possibly can.
It was much colder at R-tech this week compared to Badger 5 last weekend, just 12 degrees inside the unit. Niki also has the benefit of a back door, with a few strategically placed fans to draw fresh cold air in from outside, rather than sucking in the warmer air from inside the workshop.
so, with almost ideal atmospheric conditions for the dyno (cold and wet), a base line run was done, with some really quite surprising results!
318bhp and 310lbft, exactly as it arrived. Very promising indeed. On the old engine with this very same map, it previously made 291bhp at R-tech in feb, so the new engine is 27bhp up on the old one in similar conditions. This was at the original 18psi of boost.
The guys always use a bit of WD40 type spray to help the car get traction on the rollers, but after the first run, we noticed the rollers had gone black. Jim and Niki both said they hadn't seen that before, there was like a layer of rubber coated on the rollers from my RS-Rs!
Sticky!!
After a few issues (Niki had to pop out to attend his daughters school where she was ill - all OK now thankfully), Niki and Jim got to work with doing some load testing and making alterations to the map:
Nikis concentration face:
Strapped down with the fans in place:
The new ECU live emulator Niki has is absolutely fantastic, they load a copy of my map onto the emulator ECU, and run it on this, which can then be live mapped whilst the car is running on the dyno. So different to the old fashioned bench flash / change and re-flash method that used to be necessary with the ME3.8 ECU.
Adam Hobden popped in to say hello and was proudly showing off his new T3/4 monster turbo, having realised his ko4 hybrid was never going to beat mine
Niki carried on mapping, without the help of the water meth at first. it went up to 325bhp/318lbft first, then a few more tweaks saw 331bhp / 327lbft, with the car swallowing up LOADS of ignition advance and not pulling any corrections at all. Boost was kept at a peak of 21psi, which we both agreed we didn't want to go above.
Just before lunch, a few more tweaks saw us at 344bhp and 343lbft, still on the smallest meth nozzle, rated by AEM to 200bhp. Still seeing very little heat produced, and no corrections to the timing at all.
After lunch, Jim fitted the medium sized meth nozzle, which we had always planned to end up on, and Niki ran the car again, similar results again, 344bhp with 21 degrees ignition advance, 2-3 degrees pull in the midrange after some very heavy brake testing (out of a possible 12), but still no pull at all at the top end. Niki decided to try dialing some more timing in above 4500rpm, and the grin on his face after the first run said it all!
A bit more testing, and a few more runs, and Niki found that the car would happily take 27 degrees of timing at the top end without any CF's at all, and was making amazing power.
We settled on 25.5 degrees of timing from 4500rpm to the limiter at 7500rpm, which resulted in final figures of 353bhp and 345lbft, still at 21psi peak boost. It's still not pulling any timing at the top end, AFR is 11.9:1, and despite repeated load testing and brake testing on the dyno, right after the 353bhp run, the inlet manifold was ice cold to touch, and even the cam cover was cool enough that you could hold your hand on it, so that's where it stayed, at the full fat 353bhp.
A few other hyrbids have come close to this, one making 352bhp, and one making 348bhp, but these have both needed lots of boost to make this figure, and have been generating crazy heat, with the results not being sustainable, so Niki has pulled them all back to around 330bhp for the road. Unlike these, mine is making 353bhp with less heat than you'd usually see at 330bhp, the way it flows is just amazing.
The car feels absolutely incredible to drive, with over 330bhp held from 5000-7000rpm, and torque holding above 300lbft from 3500-6400rpm. a very broad spread indeed
3rd gear when it hooks up, from 5-7.5k rpm, is absolutely ballistic, proper hold on tight roller coaster stuff if I'm honest.
Actuator pressure remains very smooth and sensible, with 287bhp and 276lbft at 15psi.
All in all, I could not be happier with the result at all, I owe Niki, Jim, and ben a HUGE thank you for spending so long on the car, the guys cleared the diary for the whole day for me, and had no other customers all day long, just Niki and Jim, all day on my car getting it right, with Ben manning the phone and sorting out anyone who came to speak to Niki.
The drive home was entertaining in the rain, and pretty scary when I did try full boost in the wet. I'm really looking forward to getting it out on the open road on a dry day.
One last cheeky flame pic:
