ARTICLE: Points to consider before TURBO-Charging your car

[ron_9191]

Originally Posted by amarpreet99

Hi,
Having a 1.6 turbo swift, I can tell you a few things first off:
1. Its not cheap, if you want a break up of costs, when I had collected prices, the cheapest was 1.75 lakh without forged internals, cams, gear box mods or any other engine mods(this estimate is from 2010).
2. 180 BHP will need some very serious mods and equipment which will push up the costs even more from point 1.
3. There is a very good thread by @binz that you should search for for all info
4. Go with the best tuners: FRK (mine was done there). or RRP and RD (if they oblige you: since they do this more as a hobby than a professional thing now as they told me)
5. Kitna deti hai: Well I can run mine on the stock ecu for 10kmpl in bengaluru city full traffic jammed roads and on recent airport runs I got 16kmpl.
6. Smile factor: Every time you punch it.
7. Reliability: From FRK, no problems at all; its a zero maintenance thing for me.
8. IMP: Please do read the large number of threads relating to the topic and then decide on whether you should go for it
9. Make sure you have a spare car. I did it with my only car and had to deal with a lot of music and dirty looks at home from you know who.


If you do decide to go ahead I can accompany you to tuners to check out stuff

@amarpreet99 Thanks for the details. I noticed you mentioned you drive a 1.6 litre Swift. Did you plonk a 1.6 Baleno engine in your Swift?

[amarpreet99]

Originally Posted by ron_9191

Did you plonk a 1.6 Baleno engine in your Swift?

Yes,it has the baleno engine.

[james]

Originally Posted by pratika

I am curious if someone here as done a brake upgrade on their Baleno

Upgrade to Mintex Brake pads. I did and boy did they make a big difference!!!!

Originally Posted by amarpreet99

4. Go with the best tuners: FRK (mine was done there). or RRP and RD (if they oblige you: since they do this more as a hobby than a professional thing now as they told me)

The word 'Best' is so overrated. Expect hidden surprises, attitude issues, extra costs, lies, excuses and what not when you foray into this dark world of tuning.

Originally Posted by amarpreet99

9. Make sure you have a spare car. I did it with my only car and had to deal with a lot of music and dirty looks at home from you know who.

Very sound advice. Do not go ahead with TCing the car unless its your second car. I went through this and i cant tell you how stressful it was!!

You could also check out race concepts. Joel, i hear has TC'd a variety of cars with positive results BUT takes his own sweet time to do the smallest of things.

Last but not the least, whoever you go ahead with, make sure you breathe down their necks regularly or they will take you for granted. Keep at least a 3L budget and do not believe all the c0ck and bull they give you or try to sell you. Do NOT buy used stuff. Make sure they are well aware of your requirements and fix a proper time line. Discuss worst case scenarios. 140whp at 8psi on stock internals is a cakewalk for the g16b motor if done correctly!

Cheers!

[ssjr0498]

Originally Posted by IshaanIan

If you read the post properly, it is clear that brraj was talking about remapping the Octavia vRS or the Linea T-Jet and as far as I know, those are both turbo-charged rides with massive gains to be reaped from a remap

Agree, that they are not "NA" cars! The comment I made was in reference to the original post by the OP regarding doing up a NA Baleno!

Originally Posted by brraj

My friend, Who told you T-Jet/Skoda Octavia 1.8 are NA cars? Both are turbo petrol's.
All turbo charged engines are forged so internals will be strong.

Yes sir!! Very true! Wrongly, quoted your post!

Originally Posted by brraj

If you cant let the baleno go! keep it and hunt for a pre-owned T-jet which is going way cheap. Remap if you want more power.
Total peace of mind.

I actually wanted to quote this post that you made. It gave an impression that you were hinting to remapping a NA car while the OP can search for a T-jet!

My intention was to say that remapping a NA car is useless, unless the internals are upgraded! It came out the wrong way!

[brraj]

Originally Posted by ssjr0498

It gave an impression that you were hinting to remapping a NA car while the OP can search for a T-jet!

I was hinting at remapping pre-owned T-Jet.

[ron_9191]

One of the reason I was thinking about TC'ing my car was purely because there was no torque at all on revs lower than 3000 rpm. Which simply means on a wide open road I have to literally wring its neck to get moving at a reasonable speed. Not that I have a heavy right foot. I feel it will be a lot better if I could have some amount of torque that starts from 2000 rpm. If TC'ing is a leap of faith, what else can I do to increase the bottom end torque? I think if the BS3 Balenos had a little more torque at the bottom, it would be a fun little car to move around. As many suggested here, I am on the hunt for a factory TD'c car like an old Octavia 1.8 rider or vRS or a Fiat Linea T-Jet. In fact I came across a somewhat clean Octy 1.8 rider with a leaking head gasket that had a somewhat properly maintained service record. But it disappeared before I could get the money in place. So on for another one, preferably a vRS.

A bit off topic here but, are there any differences between the Skoda Octavia 1.8 Rider and 1.8 vRS rear suspension setup? For what I know about the new Octavia, the top end version comes with an independent suspension setup at the back, not sure about the old ones.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by ron_9191

One of the reason I was thinking about TC'ing my car was purely because there was no torque at all on revs lower than 3000 rpm. Which simply means on a wide open road I have to literally wring its neck to get moving at a reasonable speed. Not that I have a heavy right foot. I feel it will be a lot better if I could have some amount of torque that starts from 2000 rpm. If TC'ing is a leap of faith, what else can I do to increase the bottom end torque?

Couple of thought on improving low rev pick up. The main thing you need to do is get more air flowing through the engine faster

A couple of relative easy things:
Change the air inlet filter for a free flow or similar.
Get rid of the catalytic convertor
Look at exhaust system, some have multiple dampers, so you can consider removing one or more dampers.

Note that other then changing the air filter the other two options might have legal consequences, so you need to check.

As a very rough rule of thumb, a proper free flow filer might give you 1% extra power and removing the cat and a damper 3-5% extra power. More importantly it will improve low rev pick noticeably. i did this on my Alfa Spider with very good results.

If you want to take it step further. On most cars it is possible to see if you could remap the ECU to get better low end performance. Real hard core tuning types would put the car on a rolling road and optimize. But for many cars around there are standards settings that have been developed that can easily be downloaded into the ECU. On older ECU you could actually swap Eproms. Not sure what is available in India though.

Next you might find there are more aggressive camshafts available for your car/engine. And there might be room to polish, hone out inlet and outlet channels on the cilinder head allowing more air to move through the engine.

Although it varies from engine to engine, all of the above is likely to be simpler and cheaper and more robust then adding a TC, especially if you are looking for improving low rev pick up. TCs are not necessarily the best option.

Jeroen