With the great success in our first season with the thrown together half finished car I decided we needed a firm plan for next year.
Initially for the 2010 season I would like to see how far we can go with the same gt3071 turbo both for the challenge and budget constraints but there are some important safety upgrades that are needed before we even make another full pass with the current setup. Once the safety is addressed then we can sort out the powertrain issues.
Safety is the biggest changes we are tackling. Rules dictate we need a roll bar to go faster than 11.5 check. 
So might as well add a few more bars to stiffen the shell while we are in there. At least a 6pnt cage most likely more. A true race seat is needed to accommodate the harness requirement and the cage gives us a proper place to secure the shoulder belts. With the repeated clutch failures we will add a suitably overkill scatter shield around the flywheel. Probably will make a few copies for the other racers out there. Safety will use most of the budget if not all of it. 
The dual injector manifold we made a while back will go on with a second set of 630s at the head to shore up the high mounted 1000s. This will give us enough fuel to finish the tuning. I previously stopped short of MBT due to maxing the 1000cc injectors by 5k not the best situation to be in, even if it is a little less scary on E85. The new high mount injectors should help with ve by allowing more time for the ethanol to mix with the air on the way to the chamber. With the compressor this far out of it’s happy place there is quite a bit of inlet temp so anything should help. Current ly we run an off-the-self intercooler, same part we use on the customer cars, guess they are pretty good! I have plans for a trick intercooler setup that will either work or be a waste, have not seen one before of this design anywhere. May try a modified cylinder head if it needs to come off. As it is we are running a stock head with only mods springs and cam clearance! We really don’t need any more power right now so thats about it. I do have a cheapie external wastegate we may play with but don’t expect it to help much.
The clutch was our biggest failure item of the season so eliminating that will be a great releif. This is the main part that will requre money since we have “outgrown” the std clutches we use for customer cars. Most likely will be a very overkill multi-plate setup on a custom flywheel. I hope also to run an air clutch actuator setup. I originally played with one in my -78 99 as a result of a knee injury around 15 years ago. It used a basic air cylinder actuating the pedal with a simple flow control valve that allowed full down speed while offering manual adjustment of return speed. with the Nira it should allow us to map a Pwm output to adjust the return speed by gear. The clutch is still operated by the driver just differently. As far as inertia goes there are a few different thoughts on the flywheels effect on launching a drag car. I am more concerned with the shifting so it will probably be light with the friction tough enough to allow a little slip on launch. One problem with multi-plate clutches is the extra load on the syncros trying to slow the extra disks weight on shifting. Will tackle that when we get there. Hoping we get it close by the second time. Development sure costs money and it is certainly lots easier to just copy/paste but then thats no fun now is it.
Overall it should be a fun year with plenty of learning opportunities and I hope to have some good competition. Hint Hint! It will surely take going past this turbo to play with the hondaz. Hopefully by then we can secure some sponsors.
No Steven it won’t get a big ricer tach that reads to our limiter..
© Nick T No reproduction permitted.
I raced and hung out with a man who had a GT37~ Evo who was utilising a water-to-air intercooler. He sets them up for people in his own shop and swears buy them, and was trying to convince me to get one for my Saab. Any stock in them for us?
Also, I’d like to be a part of that ‘competition’. Teach me :D.
In short; the intercooler is not our restriction on this setup. But for a drag car if you have the budget for a 20lb bag if ice every pass water to air is good. This car is still used for backroad trips and would quickly saturate the cooler.