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Taking over the S13 flag from Dai is Patrick Goodin.
Patrick is following in Dai’s footsteps in more ways than just the chassis as this car has a GTX4508R attached to its V8 6.7L LS engine. It’s currently sitting around 820whp, but there’s way more on tap.
Road Race Engineering, the hardest working crew in SoCal, teamed up with Berk Technology to build this 350Z for Carl Rydquist.
This 6.0L LS2 with LS3 heads has a GTX4088R sized for maximum response pumping out over 800 horsepower and torque. RRE built the custom twin-scroll turbo setup and Turbosmart components help manage the boost. A swap kit from Fueled Racing was used to drop the Chevy engine into the Nissan chassis. AEM controls the engine and Vibrant Performance was used for piping and plumbing.
I roughly plotted a few of the turbo setups on my basic turbo sizing chart to see how they all stack up in terms of response. Starting with Rydquist (his GTX4088R is roughly equivalent to a pair of GT28/30 size turbos), you can see how a big engine with a relatively small turbo should have insane response. Yoshihara’s setup with his massive engine and massive GTX5018R (roughly equivalent to a pair of GT37s) should also be a response king. Essa and Denofa are running fairly similar packages with Essa using a twin-scroll setup for improved response. Tuerck and Saito are running similar engines, but Tuerck decided to use the smaller GTX4088R to get better response. Saito’s setup compensates for lag from the larger turbo by using nitrous. Creeping farther away from a ‘street’ response setup and more into ‘road course’ is Aasbo. Like Saito, to compensate for having a relatively large turbo, Aasbo uses nitrous to help the response in addition to the twin-scroll setup. The one outlier is Aono. While he does use a twin-scroll setup to help response, I imagine adding some spray will help the response as that’s the route that others have followed.
So there’s a quick look at a few of the engine packages in Formula Drift this year. It feels to me like 700whp is the minimum to play with 800whp being preferred to be competitive. A couple cars have bumped the four digit horsepower mark now. It’ll be interesting to see how the cars fare over the course of the season.
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