Project Mitsubishi EVO IX Part 6: More power

Project Mitsubishi EVO IX Part 6: More power
By Mike Kojima

When we had last left Project EVO IX we were in the good hands of Eric Hsu and XS Engineering but a number of events occurred that stopped our project dead in the water from an engine development standpoint. Eric decided to scale back operations of XS Engineering, getting away from retails sales as many of their products were getting knocked off by Chinese companies such as XS Power who even knocked off their name.  XS Engineering became a very small company servicing an exclusive clientele for custom projects and Eric moved to Cosworth where he is today.  Unfortunately we lost access to their AWD dyno and the great XS Engineering products we tested were no longer available.

Read More About Project EVO IX here!

So we had to back up a little and relaunch our engine series getting help from our friend Naji Dahi and his company Looney Tuning.  We have known Naji many years from road racing as Naji is an avid racer.  Although Naji races Nissans he has gained a good reputation as a tuner for EVOs and WRX/STIs.  Naji uses the open source tuning resource ECU Flash to tune to good effect.  Data for tuning is logged via another open source resource for EVOs called EVO Scan.

In our previous segment of messing with Project EVO's motor, we had run out of injector.  So we replaced the stock injectors with these 1000cc parts from RC engineering.  Now we will have injector headspace for whatever we can dream up.

As a dyno Naji uses a software package called Virtual Dyno that is set up for a car's particulars such as weight, tire size, gear ratio and calculated drag.  3rd gear pulls are done along a controlled road with a nearby weather station for adding ambient condition data.  The Virtual Dyno software automatically calculates horsepower and torque from data extracted from EVO scan output. Note that this uses actual logged RPM data and thus calculates power exactly like a dyno does, not using an accelerometer which is dependent on the calibration and accuracy of the accelerometer.

The deflected disc metering of the RC Engineering injector on the left gives much better atomization than the typical pintle valve of the injector on the right.  This helps the RC Engineering injectors have good part throttle driveabilty and idle even though they are pretty large.