So got the car back on Wednesday but decided to reserve my judgement for a few days, but straight out of the driveway the car was amazing. Dan was happy and surprised with the power / torque delivery and max numbers and he did warn me the car is deceptively faster then the dyno numbers indicate. For those keeps the car lost 11KW from its previous setup, and that is on Maximum's heartbreaker dyno
The car makes full boost much much sooner (3200rpm in 3rd, 3000 in 4th) but more importantly in any gear it's making boost and usable torque from 2000rpm. I don't have to beat on it in low gears to make it move, it gets up to speed in any gear with ease. It's like learning to drive a new car but power figures aside the car drive 200% nicer on and off boost then it did before. I must admit the car doesn't
feel as fast without that surge of power but the speedo doesn't lie and it's nice to be able to punch out of corners in second.
The only issue is on hard left turns and under certain WOT conditions the downpipe knocks the steering column which hopefully I can try to sort out on Sunday. If I fail at that it doesn't really matter because Dan was good enough to book me back in on Wednesday to massage the downpipe for a little more clearance.
Apart from the turbo change I also had the external gate and HKS boost controller removed. I am a little torn about the wastegate but I can finally put my foot down in a more stealthy manner (
if that is possible ). The boost controller was taking up space on my dash and it looked cool but was just not necessary for my requirements and removing it from the dash make the interior feel much more refined.
Something I had changed before handing the keys to Maximum Motorsport was the rear muffler. The cannon droned while cruising under 3000RPM and with the equal length headers it sounded too raspy in the lower RPM. So headed to
Andys Exhaust Werx and $400 later I had a new axle back section and oval muffler. No drone, slightly quieter, deeper note and that Honda raspy sound is gone.
TL;DR - area under the curve is soooo underrated, quieter more refined exhaust systems are underrated and a few niggling issues between me and track time