By Mike Kojima
One of the bad things about having an unusual car like our Lexus IS-F is that it is, well, an unusual car. The IS-F is the first attempt by a rather young maker, in this case Lexus to build and market a true performance car. Lexus has a reputation for luxury with value and rock solid reliability, not a performance and racing pedigree.
Project Garage Part IV: Air Compressors
by Sarah Forst
Many times I've struggled with stubborn bolts, cursing car manufacturers wth a number of expletives in languages I didn't know I could speak. Stripped, rusted, or fused, these bolts can make any breaker bar retire early and hit happy hour. Unfortunately if I ever wanted to mod any of my cars, my only other option was blowing off some steam… well, hot air really. My air compressor is not only convenient, but necessary.
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.
Read More About Project EVO IX here!
Over the past few months in-between other projects we have been tinkering around with AEM’s water methanol injection kit on our in-house Evo IX project car. You can read about the kit here. A few weeks ago we installed AEM’s new injection monitoring system which you can read about here.
Since the long stroke QR25DE does not like high rpm, we have chosen to limit its maximum revs to 7000 rpm and make power by adding turbo boost. Jim Wolf Technology designed our turbo system to produce power over the widest possible range of RPM rather than peak power. The JWT system was also designed for simplicity, lightness and reliability over maximum power.
Follow our project here!
With the specter of high prices once again looming over our heads, we bring you yet another fuel sipping project; Project Aprilia RS50. You might wonder what an RS50 is; it is really a very unusual machine. It is a street legal, two stroke 50cc GP replica bike.
Project Sipster Part 6 - Faster Sipster
by Dave Coleman
If you want a Diesel to make more power, you just have to squirt in more fuel. If you've never tuned an engine before, this is the most obvious thing in the world. But if you're used to tuning gas engines, this is the most preposterously naive and wrong-headed thing we've said in at least a week. Diesels, it seems, are a bit different.
UPDATE! I just found the dyno chart!
When our friends at K&N heard that we had gotten an IS-F, they got excited and insisted that we try out their Typhoon high flow air intake system as they claimed that they had gotten excellent results in their testing.
Not all of the cars in the MotoIQ stable are cutting edge performance machines. Sometimes we do have to have cars that are practical. Our current office car is a 2004 Infiniti G35 Sedan. The G35 is an excellent car for daily driving, it gets reasonable mileage in the low 20 mpg range and has 4 doors and plenty of inside room for taking the staff to lunch or meetings. The automatic transmission for dealing with bumper to bumper daily commuter traffic makes jumping into the G35 to go somewhere a no hassle proposition.
Project Miatabusa Part 7 - Mounting the Gauges
Last time we looked at cramming the Hayabusa's instrument cluster into the Miata housing, it proved to be a shockingly good fit. There was a very large unresolved issue of how to actually secure the Hayabusa cluster's circuit board, though. Here's how that project was finished:
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