VQ30 Twin Turbo Offroader
Article taken from nzefi.com
NZEFI is well accustomed to working on high powered turbocharged off road race cars. After all, we’ve been tuning and developing Daniel Powell’s monster twin-turbo VQ35DE powered Jimco for years. One of our recent projects has been Vinny Harvey’s VQ30 Twin Turbo offroader.
Vinny’s car had already been racing in the North Island before he moved down to Christchurch. The car had plenty of potential with a twin turbocharged Nissan VQ30DE engine, but mechanical design and tuning problems meant that the car wasn’t meeting Vinny’s expectations. First off, Vinny took his car to Rob at Racefab to sort out some suspension geometry issues. Both Rob and Vinny admit to getting a bit carried away and by the time Rob was done they had reengineered most of the car. At that point the wiring and tuning was the only thing left that still needed some love, so Vinny dropped the car off at NZEFI for us to work some magic.
The car already had a Link G4 Xtreme, but we decided that a complete re-wire would be the best option as we needed to add a lot of extra sensors and outputs that weren’t in the loom to start with. Some of the optional extras that Vinny took included oil pressure and fuel pressure sensors. These sensors are monitored by the Link ECU and we’ve programmed a fault condition will invoke ‘smart’ limits to protect the engine – more on this later. These off-road race cars take an absolute pounding, so waterproofing, strain relief and reliability were our top priorities throughout the wiring install. Vinny’s car got to be the first to run a production version of our new waterproof easy wiring kit – Kit W. Vinny also decided to go with the optional clear lid version as the ECU and wiring work underneath was too pretty to hide.
Once the wiring work was completed the car rolled into the our dyno room for some serious tuning on E30 fuel (30% ethanol, 70% petrol). Unfortunately the engine’s factory ignition coils did not want to co-operate and would start breaking as soon as they were under any boost. Visual inspections of the coils and gapping down the spark plugs didn’t get us anywhere so we took the full set of coils off the car and gave them a full check over on our ignition test rig. Although some coils were in worse shape than others, even the best of them was pretty wimpy so at the point Vinny told us to bin them and fit something decent. A set of six of our high energy coils with in-built igniters was fitted and wired before firing the car back up on the dyno. This time things were much different – the rest of the tune went smoothly and the new coils could light anything we threw at them.
Vinny took the freshly rebuilt car out for its first run at local club race day. After so much of the car’s suspension had been changed there was always going to be a lot of set up tweaking required to get the car handling perfectly. As expected this was the case, however what Vinny didn’t expect was just how much smoother and more powerful the newly tuned engine setup was going to be. I guess only Vinny knows exactly what it feels like to drive, but his description is “it’s unreal”.
NZEFI wishes Vinny the best of luck in upcoming race meetings and we look forward to the entertaining battle between Vinny and Daniel with their two NZEFI tuned race weapons.
