#project86 turbo shakedown V1
So by now you may have seen the vlog from our recent turbo shakedown at Wakefield Park. If you haven’t you can watch it below. The purpose of this blog post is to take the points and ideas from that video and talk about them further whilst looking at a bit of data for reference and ofcourse some initial thoughts on the turbo and where to next.
All photos in this article are by Chris Gligorov!
A quick recap for anyone who doesn't have 24 minutes to watch the video.
Last weekend saw us head down to a Wakefield Park trackday hosted by the Nissan Sporting Car Club. There were rivers running over the road in a number of key areas (the kink, t2 and fish hook) which meant nobody would be getting remotely close to setting a PB.
I completely forgot I had booked the day so I was extremely under prepared. I hit the road on my RPF1’s wrapped in the same Zestino 07R tyres i’ve been torture testing that by this stage had done half a dozen trackdays.
Given the track conditions and tyre it was the perfect excuse for a low-stress shake down day on a track that we’re very familiar with.
So what have we actually done to the car?
We’ve got a full video coming shortly talking about exactly what we have done, how and why with an eye for making a reliable track day car but i’ll give you a super quick run down of what we have done thus far:
So what went right?
On a whole it was an incredibly successful (and fun) day. 60 odd laps (the most of anyone for the day) without a single fault, leak or concern. A huge credit to the PVS team for their attention to detail on the install.
I wanted to test the cooling of both the water and oil but with ambient temperatures hitting a high of 10 degrees celsius the temps were rock solid. 90 degrees for the water and under 100 for oil even after a number of consecutive laps.
We finished the day in P3 in a pack of faster and more dialled cars. It was a non-competitive trackday so the result really doesn’t mean anything but it’s comforting to know we’re in the window given the conditions in an untested car
Did anything go wrong?
Nothing really went wrong at all thankfully. As we’ve touched on already the reliability wasn’t at all an issue nor was the cars pace. 2 things we will be addressing though is a faster set of boots. The Zestino 07R is a fantastic hybrid tyre and is standing up exceptionally well to our torture testing however we’re going to need something a little faster if we’re going to take it to the fast boys and girls.
The next is a bit of a change to the rear suspension with the aim of helping some low speed drive and overall rear end grip. Low speed drive was something i’ve always been meaning to address while the car was Naturally Aspirated and throwing a bucket of torque at it hasn’t helped at all.
Initial impressions?
I f***ing love it! It’s a bit of a surreal feeling driving a car i’m so comfortable in on a track i’ve likely done 1000+ laps on but now it’s got power. The power delivery has made it a fairly simple transition - certainly easier than I expected. I was buzzing all night Sunday and all day Monday and I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
These cars are unreal NA and I still think there’s alot to be said for learning to drive one of these properly on the limit before bolting a turbo kit om BUT I definitely think boosting your 86 is definitely something to consider before selling up to buy a “faster” car.
When it came to speccing the turbo I left it to the brains trust that is Mike and Tyler. They opted for the G30 660 for a better track power delivery and I totally understand why now. It’s a beautiful thing to drive with so much usable power.
How does it compare to the “old” car?
Given the track was off and we were on road tyres it’s hard to compare laptimes or trap speeds. I think the best way to compare is to look at some date from an NA lap.
The pink line is s 1:09.3 which is the fastest I ever went in the car NA many months ago. The blue line is the 1:12.1 from last weekend. The main thing to look at is how slow the mid corner speeds are given the wet track but how quickly the blue line not only catches up but also surpasses and ends up at a higher top speed, even when having a crap run out of 10 and lifting at the start finish line.
The other interesting find on the data is the time difference in the bottom box. We actually start clawing back considerable amounts of time in the areas where i’m at wide open throttle (WOT). Again not a surprise but very interesting to see in a data form.
This video is an interesting one. Unfortunately I can’t find the data for the NA lap but they’re within a tenth of eachother and on the exact same tire 1:12.2 vs 1:12.1. Early in the lap the NA car runs away carrying much more speed up and over the hill (because the road was dry) but towards the end of the lap the turbo car surpasses it.
Obviously this isn’t at all a surprise but it’s great to see and gets me really excited for a dry day on a fast tyre.
Where to now?
Well the car doesn’t really need anything immediately. Theres a couple of bits that i’ll keep working towards but they’re by no means essential to keep testing the car. We’ll get the car onto the PVS aligner and check that alignment out and lower the rear a touch for starters. Tyler has some ideas to settle the rear end down aswell so we will get cracking with that.
We’ve got a Trackschool Trackday booked for 2 weeks time with the rest of the crew from Prestige Tyre so which i’ll back up with an SMSP track night the following week so hopefully i’ll have a tyre under it by then.
