Voila! The liftbars make it easy to get the car up on stands.
I noticed an interesting phenomenon occur in the last 900 miles of driving which I would not have observed without the digital oil level gauge. The oil level actually increased which I verified with the readout of the oil level sensor. As I always drive in Sport + mode, the oil is kept around 90-95degC in everyday driving. The prevailing theory is water condensation is bringing up the oil level. Solution: drive the car harder to get the oil hotter to evaporate off the water. Which I can do now with the engine fully broken in per my schedule. The oil level did recede a bit after a few hard drives.
Oil drain mod at work! Another oil change hack mod I did this time around was to use a yellow paint marker on the black plastic oil cartridge filter cap to have a bright visual indicator for where the cap should be tightened to. The cap does bottom out which can be felt, but it is nice to have the visual confirmation too.
Out with the Motul street oil and in with the Motul 300V track oil; I have two track days lined up. I filled the car up with 5.7L and the digital oil gauge read full. For the next oil change, I think I will only put in 5.5L to give a little buffer against over-filling.
Swapping out the exhaust tips was mostly straight forward. The first tip, uh, piece of advice, is you have to loosen the metal band clamps holding the mufflers to their mounting bracket. You need an Allen hex wrench to loosen this bolt on the top-side of the muffler. The finger calipers say it was a 4mm hex. Maybe a 5mm hex.
The second piece of advice is loosening this exhaust pipe on the driver’s side (everywhere but the few oddball countries that follow the UK). The exhaust pipe does not need to be removed completely, just loosen up the two nuts on the flange. I tried removing the exhaust tip without taking this step of loosening the exhaust pipe, and there was just not enough free play. So off went the wheel to get access to the two nuts on the flange behind the brake caliper. I recall the nuts took a 13mm socket.
4 comments
Some of the aftermarket companies (I think Soul?) were claiming no power gains on the 718 with a straight piped catback exhaust. Different X pipe tip design than yours though. Any thoughts?
Anything the baby 2.0 stock turbo can put out, not going to see much with the going cat back. Maybe on the bigger S or GTS turbos. Even then, not much gains to be had in the exhaust until turbo upgrade in my opinion. The only real bottleneck in the stock exhaust is the stock cat. Replacing that with a high flow sport cat is the best place to uncork restriction. Otherwise, the downpipe is huge and then that splits into the two approximately 2.5″ exhaust pipes that go to straight through mufflers. At the exhaust tip, text book loss coefficient for a 90deg bend is 1.1. A 45deg bend is 0.4. Mine is 60deg but I think gain benefit by not having the pulsating flows crash into each. Regardless, need a tune to take advantage of any potential flow improvement at higher power levels. Otherwise the stock ECU will just keep on hitting the programmed in torque target. Or if on crap fuel, better exhaust flow should mean less knock. But for sure, the stock cat is the major bottleneck. The other bottleneck is the small compressor inlet tube. Raggdoll Motorsport has a good upgrade for that.
Nice design. A little surprised you didn’t angle the cuts on the tips. Hopefully the crossflow design helps with scavenging. I imagine there’s a slight change in exhaust note.
I thought about the slash tip for about a minute. But it added two more cuts along with another area to add error and visually see any misalignment of the tubes. I figured flat cut was good enough for a GT3 racecar, good enough for me.