Quote from: JimiJak on May 14, 2014, 10:59:29 PM
Quote from: Livernois Motorsports on May 14, 2014, 06:13:00 PM
The questions about why are people building engines, and what are the limitations of the drivetrains have all been posted before. It is the end of the day and we will try to address more of the questions that you guys have tomorrow.
Thank you for your follow up.
I think the biggest questions from all of this are:
- If staying around 400hp was a cooperative decision between you and the customer, under your recommendations for longevity, why sell or recommend the upgraded turbos? Staying around 14psi sustained boost is something the stock turbos could easily handle, correct?
- Are you seeing a pattern of rod failures in 450+hp engines?
- What types of hp are they pushing?
- How many / frequently have you found this?
- Any other trends in the broken con rod engines?
ie. where did they get the majority of their power?
uber high boost, meth, turbo upgrades, E-85 mixing etc.
There is a lot of knowledge to be gained from your findings, and we would like to join you in establishing safer means of building powerful, modified daily drivers without breaking the bank.
The engines that we have seen fail have come to us as engines being shipped from around the country, not the whole car so we cannot see what exactly the owners of these engines have going on, many of these failures we have seen the owners have not disclosed their mods, nor power level, but based on our experience, and knowledge of these engines we know the range they would be in.
We have only seen a few failures from engines sent to us by other shops, so not that often. We have not yet had a failure with vehicles that we have done and tuned. The way that these vehicles are tuned also plays a huge part into the failures. The ones that we have seen fail are above the 450 Whp mark.
When we tune customer cars we go over all of the risks involved in tuning, and we make our customers aware of these. We then take our knowledge that we have acquired through testing on our own shop cars, and knowledge from OEM durability testing and apply that knowledge to our suggestions. Our goal in this industry is to be the best and offer our customers superior offerings and reliability for their vehicles. To us, reliability means years, and decades of enjoyment, not just a season or two.
We offer and sell components that exceed the power limitation because without them, there would be no expanding of the market. We want people to not reach a ceiling, instead, we offer our information to them to make an educated decision on what is the best route for them. Many of our customers that elected to push the envelope had it in their mindset to build an engine anyways, regardless of if, or when it broke. Being this customer specifically road races the car, we educated him on the reasoning behind scaling the power back to ensure durability, but the upgraded turbos will still have benefits beyond the HP and TQ numbers. And now, when he upgrades his engine after, he can really enjoy those turbos