Got the turbo bug, Need advice coming from TVS 2.3

tt335ci03cobra

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I personally wouldn't go over 15psi on a turbo street cobra. You can set it up for more, but the window of safety is great to have. Gas can be bad at purchase, it can be excessively hot one day to the next, etc.

15psi optimally used (15psi from a tiny t2 40mm inducer is far less actual air/requisite stress than 15psi through a huge t5 80mm inducer. Same way 15psi from a stock eat on vs 15psi through a 4.0 whipped is dramatically different).

You will make about 100-150whp more running 15psi through a nicely done (nothing crazy fancy) turbo system vs a 3.0-3.3 pd blower at 15psi. It will also pull much differently and be 50-100wtq fatter from 4000rpm to redline assuming it's seeing all 15psi. The punch is very different. It's why a 600whp turbo cobra pulls about as hard as a 700-725whp blower cobra and trap basically about the same.

I've seen people run 18-19psi on 76mm Cobras with pump gas but there's no window of safety in something like that. Get bad gas, a very hot day, etc a few times and it will likely blow. Also, 800-850whp is quite a bit for a street car. That's enough for 145-150mph traps in a 3500lbs cobra with a driver and good chassis/transmission mods. If you need that power and more, run race gas above 15psi. $4 more per gallon is cheap insurance vs rebuilding a long block (#8 in the head often melts) for $3-7k.

Price wise, $15k is high, but it's where a first time turbo build usually ends up. Clamps, tubing, moving accessories, brackets, idlers, serpentine setups and so on add $200 here, $380 there $190 here $440 there you get the point... Quickly you get a few grand in dinky sh*t you didn't even care to change in the first place. Suspension is over a grand, it's wise to change some of the cooling system, you'll want to get the battery in the trunk for space, but the nhra legal setups cost $125+. The dinky shit adds up quick. You can do it without gauges but that's boarderline idiotic, so $500-1500 there, on and on.

This said, it's not because it's a turbo car, it's because it's a 750-1000whp car. Building a blower car to those power levels isn't too much cheaper. To run a 4.0, you need a hood and often a kmember for clearance. You definitely need cooling mods, guages obviously are a must, etc etc.

$10k and under is a very good place to be on a first time build.

Auto spools faster and shifts better for turbo builds. And a wotbox 2-step gets you 85% plus of those great characteristics for $250 plus time to install and adjust it. You don't have to go auto if you are versed on the tricks that JDM and Euro turbo builds use. It's impressive how quickly a 2jz or rb20-30 can be setup to spin a t5-t6 turbo. Things like spool valves (arguably flawed), divided manifolds and flanges, tuning tricks, 2-steps and wot boxes all make a manual car or even an auto car that much faster.

Exhaust will have to be pretty custom. If you run a turbo car with mufflers and cats it will be painfully quiet.

Front grill mount and bumper exhaust is custom, requires moving many things, and is more prone to failure unless you run an air filter, and oil/heat guards. It's rare, but you can discharge a bit of oil from a bumper exit system and really burn up the bumper/fender. It's almost impossible for it to hit the rear tire so that's not an issue, but a front bumper exit setup could get oil onto a front tire but it'd have to be a poorly thought out design.
 

s351

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water/meth is a great safety net for a pump gas car if used for insurance on an 18 psi car. Don't be the guy who uses it as race gas.
 

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