Towards the end of September I finally got the car back on the road again. A number of problems with the clutch had slowed progress substantially. But it was great to have it going again.
After getting the car MOT'd the goal was to run the car in as quickly as possible. The methodology I followed is broadly the one recommended by Mototune which is to let the car warm up, then give it a number of hard runs through the rev range, allowing it to cool briefly between each run. From memory I started in 3rd gear, going from 2000-4000rpm about a dozen times, then half a dozen in 4th gear from 2500-4500, another few up to 5000 and progressing up to 6000rpm. After just 45 minutes that was the bulk of the running in done and it was vital for the oil and filter to be changed. I also cut the filter open to see the state of it, as expected it was full of small pieces of metal left over from the machining processes and also from the moving surfaces as they wear in.
I followed this up with another 150 miles on the road at which point I suffered a siezed wheel bearing, causing a rush to get it fixed before the rolling road session. At the same time I changed the oil and filter and again checked the state of the filter, this time it was absolutely pristine, which just goes to show why this sort of running in regime with strict filter and oil changes is worth doing.
At emerald we didn't have to do a full map since the car had previously
been mapped. First we did a few checks on the fuelling, adding some
extra to compensate for the extra air that the new head was supplying.
Then we reset the boost map and did an initial power run, resulting
in 310bhp. After a lot of tweaking of the boost map to keep the
injectors within spec we ended up with 320bhp and 280lbft of torque.
On previous runs we had seen a couple of bhp more but only by running
an extra 2° of advance, given the tiny improvement it seemed
sensible to stick with the original timing.
So after all this time the car is finally putting out the sort of power that it was supposed to and is an absolute scream to drive. What's interesting is that the GT turbo is spinning up 500rpm earlier than the old turbo, which is exactly what it's supposed to do. The extra boost that we're generating seems to be worth 25-30bhp which means that the porting was worth 30-35bhp.
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