Friday, June 27, 2008

First Dyno Results

We put the STI on the dyno and did some baseline passes. The car made a respectable 244 hp and 245 lb-ft of torque to the wheels. This is about what I'd expect from a car rated at 305 hp at the crank -- I use a rule of thumb of 20% drivetrain loss for an AWD car on our dyno. Hmm...305 times 80% equals...hey, it's exactly 244! (I guess I'll keep using the 20% rule...)

Then we switched to the Stage 1 map on our Cobb AccessPort, and ran the car again. The change was dramatic: 264 hp and 289 lb-ft! That's a gain of 20 hp and a whopping 44 lb-ft of torque. We did all these pulls within about a half hour of each other.

For the record, the weather was pretty hot -- the temp at the dyno was 98 degrees F, and 25% ambient humidity.
This isn't ideal turbo-car weather, but at least both sets of runs were under the same conditions. If you are interested, that SAE correction mentioned on the graph means the numbers are scaled up by 2-3% to try to normalize for the heat.

I did notice that below about 3000 RPM, the car actually LOST a little power, and I've heard some other people complaining about that on the off-the-shelf Cobb Stage 1 map. We'll be doing some additional custom tuning on the car, so stay tuned for more gains, and (I hope) recovering that lost low-end power.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

HyperFest 2008

On June 21, we took the STI to HyperFest. We didn't actually put the car ON the track, but we had it on display at our Mach V booth, and got a lot of nice feedback about the car. Many non-Subaru owners recognized that it was an STI, and knew about the car. "This is the new STI, right?" We continue to get HUGE positive response about the wheels, so it looks like those will stay, despite the slightly-too-low offset.

The drive to and from Summit Point was pleasant. Good weather, nice roads. The early morning light was good, and we got a few rolling shots of the car.

The HyperFest turnout seemed really big -- we had a lot of booth traffic all day long. Organizer Chris Cobetto said he suspected this was the highest turnout they've had.

Our booth was next to the Grassroots Motorsports magazine booth, and we got to chat with associate publisher Greg Voth. My not-so-humble opinion is that GM is a great publication, with some of the best technical content of any of the sports car magazines currently offered. Greg was clearly an enthusiast, and knew a lot about a ton of different cars. We talked about participating in one of their Subaru projects. If that happens we'll post here about it.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Photo Shoot!

We assembled a crack team of photographers and assistants -- okay, okay, it was just me -- to shoot the Mach V STI on a summer evening. Many mosquito bites later, we had a few shots we liked.

If you're interested, I was using a Canon 30D digital camera, with a couple of different lenses, and a tripod.

In my experience, it's MUCH easier to get good car shots during the "golden hour" right after sunset, or right before sunrise. Not only do you get nice sky colors, but the car details are also softened up a lot, and little flaws -- chips or small bits of dirt -- are less obvious. But it's tough because there's only about an hour, and setting up shots a
nd moving the car and equipment around is time-consuming.

You can view more pictures -- and mega-sized versions of them -- over at this thread on NASIOC.