Street Tuning A Freshly-Turbocharged Honda S2000
All it takes is “conservative” levels of boost to really wake up an S2000.
It’s always nerve-wracking to take a new build out for the very first time, especially under its own power, but it’s a necessary procedure to break-in new parts. Having a passenger monitor all the engine parameters certainly helps. “We’re pretty conservative for 5lbs of boost.”
Or, at least that’s the spring they are running for the wastegate. One gauge in the car showed nearly 10 lbs at one point. But the street pulls seem to be doing good and everything is tuned to be nice and gentle for now.
This AP1’s blow off valve right now might be a cheap eBay unit, but the other parts on the car are pretty solid. Turbo boost is provided by a Precision 58/58 turbo with Precision wastegate. A custom Swankymods turbo manifold completes the turbo setup and it’s all run by a Haltech ECU.
After the run, ambition ramped up for the pending dyno tune, as they plan to run up to 20 lbs of boost, but aren’t sure if they should step up from 10, to 15, then to 20. Or, perhaps they might go straight to 20 psi since they will be in controlled testing. In the end, they decided on 18. “Yeah we’ll go 18 pounds of boost and adjust the timing.” That was summarized, along with an indication of next steps. “Alright guys, as you just saw, we just went out and drove it for about an hour. We put about 50 miles on it just driving around town. We got in some boost, did some tuning and everything looks cool and pretty conservative for us to continue breaking it in until it hits the dyno.”
ALSO SEE: Home-built Turbo S2000 Shoots for 700 Horsepower
They did some additional cruising with the car just to make sure an earlier coolant issue was working. And also recorded some drive-bys for our audio pleasure.
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