When I bought my UK turbo MY00 it had minimal mods (K&N induction kit, magnex exhaust) which at the time seemed to suit. However, as is always the case I decided I wanted to experiment and gain more power. After I posted on TTS forums (Tyne Tees Scoobies) I decided that a decat downpipe and boost controller were the way to go. I decided to get a sports decat downpipe as I didnt want to jeopardise the chances of getting it through an MOT so I purchased a Ninja Fast Flow Sports cat downpipe and a Hybrid EBC. After fitting the downpipe John Pye Motorsport carried out a det check to ensure that the boost I was running wasnt an issue (16PSI), however, circumstance meant they couldnt carry out an AFR check at the time. At this point I had made contact with Harvey Smith as I recognised his name from many years ago and sure enough, we had worked together in the late 90s, however, in a totally unrelated industry. Harvey suggested I take the car to him and he would carry out a wideband AFR check to make sure all was OK, which I did. The results were just as I had hoped and no issues were found.
We got talking and Harvey said that by porting the headers I would gain a decent amount of power. I decided to do this and in conjunction with Harvey decided to carry out some tests on performance.
On a closed road we did timed runs for acceleration from 1500 to 6000 RPM in both directions 4 times, using 4th gear. These are the results:

Mods to car:
Ninja Fast Flow Sports cat downpipe
Hybrid EBC boost set at 16PSI
Magnex SS Middle Back
K&N Induction kit
Out In
21.14 21.34
21.54 21.48
21.20 21.05
21.24 21.03

Average = 21.25


Mods to car:
Harvey Smith ported headers & up-pipe
Other mods as above.
Out In
20.87 21.00
19.48 21.12
20.48 21.04
19.70 20.95

Average = 20.58

On the whole the car felt much quicker than the average time suggests, Harvey had in fact wanted to test from 1500 to 6500 RPM but on the road we used it wasnt practical as before fitting the car just couldnt get there safely in the space we had. After fitting it was a different story and there seemed much more road still available when 6000 RPM was reached. Harvey believed the results would be wider using more revs.

Personally I am very happy as from my point of view the car seems smoother and less 'lumpy' at low RPM and boosts 2-300 RPM earlier, altogether a smoother cleaner drive. The exhaust note is the dogs danglies too.
All I need now is the TD05 & Apexi fitting and that nice remap carrying out... Harvey has agreed to fit the Apexi and remap after fitting the TD05 and Walbro fuel pump so I look forward to the next set of results.

 

interesting reading and good result .

well done

 

Thanks

It was an enlightening experience for a first time scooby owner and one which made me realise how little I know about car performance in general, never mind high performance tuning

 

harvey ported my wastegate on my turbo and i have a set of his headers and up pipe too and they really are great makeing a lot of diffrence and they dont move the spool up times further up the rev range like tubular headers do

 

Well my 'Harvey' ported and wrapped headers and uppipe have my TD05-16G spooling up to 1 bar at 2800 rpm. Can't complain at that.

 

I was disappointed in the apparent time difference having measured many cars like this in the past and I was expecting to knock a second off the time but the actual distance saved was something like 50 yards. Previously it was not possible to run to 6500 rpm in the space available. The gap would have been far greater had we used 6500 rpm as the end point. It was also a warmer day by about 8 deg.C when we did the second tests and the car is still on a top mount.
Because of bad weather the car was run for about a week before it could be re-tested and the added willingness and the benefit of the earlier spool is not really portrayed by the time difference.
The car now has a Walbro fuel pump supplied by me, a second hand TD05 that Mike obtained on e-Bay and an Apexi Power FC from a member on here, and now we have fitted and mapped these I look forward to obtaining further comparable test results when we have suitable weather conditions.

The car now produces 300 bhp in normal road trim although we saw 305 bhp on some runs on the rollers during mapping. The car still runs a sports cat and there will be further gains when we add a heat blanket to the turbo, a heat divider and remove the sports cat.

All very modest expenditure to get a UK 2000 to 300 bhp at just over 1.1 bar.