Project FR-S- Getting Torque Everywhere with an Innovate Motorsports Supercharger

Before installing our blower we redynoed our car to establish another baseline.  We suspected that our car's overactive ECU was busy dialing out the power we had gained from our previous round of bolt ons.  The car felt like it was getting slower over the last 3000 miles.  We were dismayed to find that most of our power was gone and the power was fluctuating a lot on the dyno. Our mods and our more aggressive previous tune were probably putting our car on the knock limit to the point where the ECU was constantly trying to pull timing and richen the mixture.

When we did our new baseline for the car before the supercharger, we were shocked to find that the engine's super adaptive ECU had dialed out almost all of the power we had previously gained in our last round of mods.  We could tell that the car was getting slower over the last 3000 miles but we had no idea it was this bad.  Run 2 was an example of our stock power and run 101 was our new test baseline.  In 3000 miles our car had dialed itself so far back that we now only had 4 whp more than stock!  This car is really discouraging to tune on 91 octane gas.

John Visconti told us that our gas was so bad, he was having trouble getting results when we last flashed our car's ECU.  We theorized at the time that we were hard against the engine's knock limit on our piss poor California fuel.  12.5:1 on 91 can do that, direct injection or not.  So we reflashed our ECU back to stock.  After some experimenting we found that our car ran the best with stock programing with a 1.0 ignition advance multiplier.  By flashing this, our ECU is limited by the amount it can retard the timing from stock.  The multiplier is .7 from the factory.  This got us another 3 hp.  This means that we have gotten only 7 whp from all of our bolt ons to date, not good.  We are pretty sure that the car will not dial out power from here on as we have eliminated its ability to retard the timing to the same extent as before.

So here is the bad news.  The power for our bolt ons before dial out, run 64.  The power after 3000 miles of driving, run 101 and the power after flashing back to stock with a 1.0 ignition timing multiplier run 112.  Not good.  We are starting to get discouraged about the car more than any other we have ever attempted to build. Time for a supercharger!

As a first step Howard is removing the factory intake manifold.  On an FA this operation is a lot easier to perform than on an EJ Subaru motor as the plumbing and wiring routings are planned out better. 

The intake manifold comes off quickly.  It is made of lightweight plastic, probably part of the design effort by the platform development team to keep the car's CG lower.  We are about to raise it but it's for a good cause, more power!

The factory throttle body is removed to be reused on the supercharger.