Mike's PT Cruiser

03.18.04

Dyno Day!

A couple of weeks ago, at a local PT Cruiser Club meeting, I met this guy, Adam, who was developing a CAI/uppercharge piping combo for the PT Turbo. Long story short: we got together to test his kit on my car to see what, if any, HP gains could be realized from this.

Here's the lowdown; we used my car, an '04 Limited Edition Platinum Series with the 180HP Turbo Lite motor. This car has an auto tranny, but it is NOT the autostick sequential semi-automatic, rather just the plain old auto. This meant we could not hold the car in 3rd because it kept wanting to downshift when we got on the power, so all dyno runs were done in 2nd gear. A higher load in 3rd may well have meant higher HP numbers, but we got what we got!

The runs were done at approximately 4:00PM, humidity was 27.9%, air temp 82.3F and absolute pressure was 29.66. The baseline runs were done using the following configuration:

-180HP Turbo Lite engine with Stage 1 installed
-Stock air filter, although the white silencer had been removed (we replaced my K&N drop in with the a stock filter, and not a terribly clean or new one for that matter!) All other intake piping, airbox, etc were bone stock.
-BTG cat/back dual exhaust

This resulted in a max power output at the front wheels of 175.1HP and torque of 196.7ft-lbs. We did three runs all HP figures were within 2HP, torque was similarly tight

Next we installed Adam's cold air intake/uppercharge pipe configuration. Everything else remained the same.

This change resulted in a max power output of 205.3HP and torque of 210.0ft-lbs. Again, we did three runs, and all were within a couple of HP or ft-lbs.

Bottom line - by adding this kit we picked up 30HP at the front wheels!

The pictures on the right will give you a pretty good indication of the kit, and the dyno run printout pretty much tells the story.