It was a good timing thing. I opened the doors here in 1984 and I was in one of the early issues of Turbo. The car was an 1986 Buick and we did a back half exhaust, we got 13 horsepower and at the time I didn't think about of it. It was more noise but it definitely picked up some power. That spawned all the 2.5-inch conventional muffler stuff. It became an industry. Borla was the first one to come out with a back half setup.
After that we were generating a lot of information on the Buick. There weren't a whole lot of turbo cars out in 1986 that had a magazine based around them. Turbo magazine worked out really good for me because we ran an ad in the back of the magazine for several years and that little ad did its job. We swapped out the text and stuff featuring our intercooler necks and gaskets and so on. We had guys calling to order 40 gaskets at a time.
I remember worrying that we made more cast necks than there were intercoolers out there. Ten years ago I thought I better not order anymore of those. It's probably going to be a dead duck and I would end up with 100 intercooler necks laying around. The Buick thing just keeps going on and on. The neck is 30 hp and a pound and half difference in boost; nothing to sneeze at for sure.
Break Through Technologies
The single biggest advancement without a doubt was factory electronic fuel injection. From that point on injection has been an integral part of turbocharging. The diesel industry spawned better turbos because when we came into it in the mid 1980s we were dealing with 20-year old turbo technology-T04Bs and the like; pretty crude by today's standards. But believe it or not, diesel trucks then the small car industry and motorsports drove the quality of the product to the next level.
Aftermarket stand-alone engine management has come a long way from the early days when a tuning computer had two knobs; one for spark control and one for fuel.
Now high-end Motecs have so much technology that they can surpass your ability to even figure what you can do with what you have; a way more powerful tool than you can use. This, however, is much better than having expectations that go beyond the technology of the unit. There were times in the early days when in your mind you had what you needed but in the computer's mind it wasn't going to play the game. We were able to tune in our heads where the computer could not get to. It was frustrating at times but that's the cost of being right on the leading edge of something. Pushing the boundaries of technology leaves a lot of broken parts in your wake.
Everything you know about race engines applies to turbo engines. We started off with expecting the turbo to the bulk of the work. Build the engine as good as possible and have the turbo feed that engine. The power levels have escalated. We started off our first big number was 600 hp. We hit it with a nitrous set up, dynoed it at 600 horsepower and thought that was a real big deal. Today I have customers out there running 1,600 horsepower, 191 mph through a '87 Regal.
The key to tuning is evolution; making things better; bigger camshafts, bigger bore, some times more compression. And we have gotten a little bit smarter about it too. There are some really interesting things that happen when you play with bore and stroke, rod ratio and that sort of thing. It's relevant to how you build a turbo engine. Going from three hp per cubic inch to six, seven, eight hp per inch is saying a lot. The reliability today is far greater than we had when we were making half the horsepower.
Gasket technology is something that most people would look right past but gaskets are key when it comes to reliability. We could do no better than the components available to us to use. Back then there were no "turbo pistons" we had to change the design to make it work in our world.