How fast is a 86 with 20V?

[Mux213]

NoHachi,

Thats my point. I believe you can have great improvement in performance but not notice it due to the 'feel' of the car. In the same way you can think your car has become 2ce as fast but in reality you hardly have an improvement in performance (turbo'ed cars are a great example because of the kick in the back you get when the power kicks in, but its a trade in, more power ontop, much less power in the bottom end).

The real question is, is this just a feeling, or has the car indeed not become faster. If its the latter the next question is, how can a car with 50% power increase only shave of a second on its laptimes. Could be that you have a more powerfull engine but with a much smaller powerband. Could be a mismatch on your gearbox so you cant optimally use the newly found power. Could be the engine is 2ce as heavy as the original engine effecting the power/weight ratio. The list goes on and on.

There was a good thread about this on I think gummen, but could have been 8200 where the Honda vtec engine was discussed. The problem being that the car being discussed was tuned in such a way that the gearbox was set up that when you shift to the next gear, you end up below its powerband and the car lost time in the part where the RPM had to increase back into the powerband. Sorta like when you tune a turbo that you keep shifting into an rpm range where the turbo can't build up the needed presure, you need to make sure your gearbox allows you to stay within the powerband when shifting.

On a side note, this is exactly the problem I have with my ford station turbo diesel, I need to pull it beyond its powerband before shifting or it will end up on to low rpm in the next gear and the turbo lag on this thing is idiotic, its power band is somewhere between 2000 rpm and 3200rpm, but if I shift at 3200 rpm, I end up around 1500rpm. If I pull through to about 4000 rpm (near redline) and I shift I get back into the power band but the power between 3200 and 4000 is not to good, better then 1500-2000 rpm though.