Heya folks,

I've had so many requests about what was done to the car and how over the last few weeks and sorry for not being able to answer promptly. Now that things have settled down, I figured rather than answer each and everyone individually I'll break down all of the mods, post some pictures and exchange some information etc.. Quite a few new things were tried out on the car, especially for a tippy and I'm very pleased with the end result. Obviously put your wallets away heheh. For some of the techie stuff, I'm sure Kevin and Stephen can jump in at anytime to answer any questions.

The Imagine 640t name was Stephen's idea and although we can't dyno the car for "official" numbers, judging by some of the track numbers we've seen we know that "640" is an extremely conservative underestimation.

 

First things first, Kevin came out for a visit to ensure my car was running right. She wasn't healthy so a couple of things that I picked up from him.

Change the oil more frequently than we're told by the manual. Every 5k on a modded car is just fine. It's cheap, not very chearful but a good thing to do.

Second having spark plugs on a modded car after 25k yielded some rather yucky plugs. Yes they are a PIA to change but well worth doing. Now that I know how, I'll be doing them at least every 10k. We knew we had an issue here because not only was my car "hesitating/stuttering" but being a 2001, most of the TTs came with the crappy BERU 5s. We upgraded to the BERU 6s (Bosch's are even better I understand), so those of you with 5s think about going to 6s.



No we're ready to mod so on to the good stuff.

 

Originally Kevin had set me up with a set of his K16/Hybrid Billet wheel turbos, with his own backplate design and iconell larger waste gates (which I shouldn't have shimmed shut but that's another story). The wheel was clipped and the housing ceramically coated. These turbos would easily push 1.2/1/3bar

But after a second visit and some revisions made.

Kevin went back and reingineered them with his Zero Clearance process to improve airflow and up the efficiency from 74% to 95%. At the same boost level, thus you're flowing a larger volume of air- a good thing we can all agree.

This is what zero clearance looks like. Try getting a hair through that gap

 

I'd dallied with the idea of matching up some kind of headers but with all the discussion of long tube headers not working and others rarely making power, Kevin came up with the idea of taking what was good about the stock design and improving upon it.

So he individually ported out the headers, made some improvements at the collecter and then used some high temperature coating. The result being that I can literally now touch my headers after running the car hard.

Either way a good alternative to spending 5k on headers that sometimes end up loosing power or not really doing all that much. Still a very labour intensive project no doubt

The guys are also working on a Throttle body project but more on that when it's done.

 

Mated with a Fabspeed 100 cell exhaust, obviously with that kind of hardware some serious volume of air can be pushed and Stephen's custom GIAC IBE programs were used. 91 octane mode, 100 race program and the stock are all available on that nifty switch you guys have probably seen.

I watched Stephen physically do it and although it's a very fidly process, he showed me the soldering and even though it took a long time, it looked great. No sense in rushing or causing a problem down the line

 

The stock set up is decent for a stock car but again, for a modded one, you've got to start thinking about trying to match things there.

Originally I started out with some H&R sways. Yes it stiffened the car up but that mod alone really fudged up the stock shocks and by 20k the guys had slapped some of these in:

Everyone's favorite PSS9s were mated to GT3 sway bars (lighter than the H&Rs incidentally which clanked like hell). Several different attempts were made with drop links and we're going to settle on a final set of Bob Brook's in-house MASSIVELY strong drop links. Maybe he can show you a pic since I don't have one handy but in comparison to the ones seen in most kits, I have to say they look so much more beefy and why not over-engineer something as important as that anyway? Fancy going around a high speed turn with your drop link failing? No thanks.

We plopped in an EVO strut brace at the front for good measure. Stiff she is/was but since it's a street car we shied away from camber plates. The negative camber was set for 2.2 in the rear and 1.8 in the front, which is all we could do without using camber plates.

Motons in the future maybe?

A Porsche Tequipment roll bar was put in, which also increased rigidity somewhat. Plus all the kids these days love it...

 

There's a lot of confusion over different 6/8 piston Brembo kits out there. It's late and I'm a little confused still myself, so Kevin/Stephen should probably step in... To my knowledge there are only two of these kits in the US right now. One is on Alex's car and the other is on Alex's car (Scargo one). These are the eight piston, titanium inserts, eight pads, 15 inch slotted rotors with stainless steel braided lines kit. Cheap they most certainly aint but stop they most certainly do.

The Gran Tourismo kit looks like this:


Obviously bleeding the system dry is needed when swapping out the big reds and the pedal is so so stiff nowadays. We used some ATE Super Blue but obviously some prefer Motul etc...

Having bigger brakes is great and all but not if you don't want to upgrade to 19 inch wheels. 19 inch wheels may look great (and they do) but the tire choice is limited and the sidewall to small for real racing and hence there are no race tires available. We wanted to make sure we stuck with 18s and the guys had Kinesis and Brembo match the specs of these new brakes and wheels. The end result was custom offset K18r's only a few days later.

Here are the front 15 inch 8 piston boys

The rears are 14inch 4 piston calipers


As you can see from the pictures we've got some fatties on there. The fronts are 265/35s and the rears 315/30s. Fender rolling was required and some heat gun fenderwell massaging. It's only plastic...

Stephen breaking them in (pun intended) was a lot of fun. I was in the passenger seat and clambering all over the place

One final thing, I copied CJV's GT3 brake duct idea which you can see here. These are a good improvement over the stock ducts- not even sure they're worthy of that name.


They look great and probably work really well for most brakes, except we're unsure on our kit due to the way slotted rotors cool from the inside out and whether or not we're actually creating a hot spot. Either way the guys recommended I remove them.

 

Daz all for tonight folks..

Over the next lil' while I'll update more:
1)Interior Stuffs
2)Custom Boost Gauge (much more accurate)
3)The trick Nitrous cooling system
4)Mounting bracket and stock-looking operation
5)Aero Dynamics (still working on that)
6)Weight reduction

The neatest part has to be their transmission cooler. They can talk to you about the design but ANY modded tipronic needs something like this. The way they've set mine up has basically doubled the cooling capacity. A cool tranny, is a healthy tranny. A healthy tranny can go to work on the track

 

Looking good sharky...
Just to clarify more confusion on brakes: There are currently 2 types of 8-piston kits offered for the 996TT from Brembo. The first is the Grand Turismo kit like I have on my car with cross-drilled rotors and I believe aluminium calipers. The second is the Brembo Gran Turismo RACE brakes which are the ones on the Sharktronic (TM) in this thread. Note taht these are what has previously been referrred to as the 'Le Mans' system which is false advertising and a nomenclature Brembo never used for this system since no car in Le Mans really run these...I think the whole 'Le Mans' thing started here or on the M5 forum. Either way, this is from here on the GT race system. This is further supported by the following list of systems form the brembo site (scroll down to Porsche ) http://www.brembo.com/applist/Brembo...ice%20List.pdf

 

Sharky...

Awesome work! Can wait to see what follows next. Hope you're either writing a lot of articles or have a sponsor to pay for all your mods. Of course the latter would always be ideal!

 

MONKEYTRONIC ROCKS!

 

Don't forget we sent the PSS9s out to have the revalved to our specs...This was done before we sent the PSS9s to meet up with us in CA.

 

Tell me more about the brake cooling plastic air shovel. What is different about it? Where can I get one?

 

The shovels are quiet a bit larger with more aggressive scoops. They are about twice the size of the original ones. They are available through the dealer or any PPE dealer.

 

What do I need to ask for?