What a Difference a Day Makes

The car has come back from RaceTorque after it's tune-up, this time not just looking at the fuelling but also at the cam timing. And boy, what a difference.

The original run had 139rwp and 191Nm - with the changes, it's now 160rwhp and 219Nm, and increase of 15% across both figures. What's more interesting is that the average power is now higher than the maximum power from the previous runs.

To get this, the tuner made some fairly significant changes, retarding the exhaust by 4 degrees, and advancing the inlet by 6 degrees. This is where the fly-cut pistons came in - they gave confidence that the valves would clear, even with this fairly significant move. The tuner stopped increasing the offset only because we were now risking having the inlet and outlet valves touch.

It's also cured the stalling at part-throttle, smoothed out the power delivery and stopped all the popping and crackling on overrun. All that was missing was the pine-scented little tree hanging from the rear vision mirror.

Sets me up nicely for this weekend anyway - but it's one less excuse if I get pummeled by everyone else ;-)