The main reason I decided to race the Evo IX over a new BMW in the Targa Newfoundland is the ease at which you can coax power out of the Mitsubishi. Granted, there is a distinct advantage of turbocharging, but there’s also the costs to consider. The E46 M3 motor (S54 to Bimmerphiles) is already pumping out well over 110hp per liter so getting any more out of it requires fairly significant work. Regardless, the fact that the car has the propeller on it’s nose means that most tuners put a ridiculous mark up on parts that you simply don’t find with Japanese cars. You are hearing about S54s pumping out close to 320-330 wheel horsepower, but the cost is 3-4 times the cost to get the same out of the Evo IX.

Given how many cars there are with his set-up, I decided to use Vishnu’s XEDE piggy-back computer to tune my RS. At some point I may go full-bore and buy a MoTec or PecTel full engine management system, but the XEDE is low cost and fairly well proven. I picked one up for a song off of evolutionm.net, and arranged with Shiv to add on the SMART upgrade (basically a wide-band O2 sensor) and the XEDE ECU flash. All of this was scheduled weeks in advanced to be installed on October 20th, and I took the day off of work to get it all done.

Before the tuning, the car only has basic bolt-ons. An Injen intake feeds air into the turbo, while Injen hard pipe intercooler plumbing mates to the Injen intercooler to cool the air before the throttle body. A Tanabe Concept G turbo-back exhaust (including downpipe, test pipe, and exhaust) expels gases back out. The final touches, a Walbro upgraded fuel pump, Magnecor wires, and heat range 8 NGK plugs, ensure that the right fuel and spark are available at all times.

After some miscommunication as to which location to meet Shiv at, and a slightly inappropriate high-speed run from Danville to Union City behind his tweaked 335i twin-turbo, the car was delivered to Full-Function Technology for installation of the XEDE and tuning. An STi was on the dyno before me. Complications from the Suby combined with how late we all got to the shop meant that my 11am appointment was actually a 4pm dyno run. This appears to be Shiv’s usual idea of “customer service”.

Once it was strapped in and Shiv’s laptop hooked up for tuning, my IX made an unholy roar as it was revved on the dyno. What an awesome sound. With the test pipe on the car, unburned fuel would ignite on the tailpipe when the throttle was closed, with a nice little jet of flame to show that the car means business.

But the numbers were disappointing. With my level of mods we should have seen ~290whp on 91 octane and well over 300whp on race gas. But the 91 octane runs were topping out at about 270whp. Something was wrong.

The issue appeared to be a boost leak of some sort, as the car was topping out at about 1.35bar, where we should have been seeing 1.6 to 1.7 bar at peak. Hmmm. Shiv seemed to think it was inefficiencies in the intercooler, but that seems pretty doubtful. To see that much of a loss from the Intercooler is unlikely. This is going to require some work to sort out. Not an auspicious start to this car’s life as a racer.

With the car not putting out what it should, we decided to not even bother doing the race gas program. Once I can sort out why it’s not making boost, we’ll come back and re-tune it on the 91 and at that point we’ll create the race gas program.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Testing & Tuning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.