As A Whole: Edit The Best Bang For Your Bucks?

[Lawsy]

I was thinking earlier on that XR6T owners quite possibly have the best bang for your bucks modification money can buy.

Lets not isolate this just to XR6T's. I honestly would like to find out, on basically any car, what can provide across the board increases of 25-30% that the Edit does, for a similar price.

So to do this, we'll have to take 2 different approaches.

Outright power increase, $/kw.

Before I show you what I mean, lets get a reasonable baseline. Lets keep this realistic, and take an accepted realistic real wheel power average of a fit XR6T, between manuals and automatics.

I think 195 would probably be accepted by most for a fit XR6T. Not the fittest possible, but fit nonetheless. If you don't know the exact rwkW increase, but you do know flywheel or roughly, lets us know anyway. But keep it realistic and be as accurate as possible.

Ok,

Example 1

195kw XR6T. Most custom tuned edits get over 245rwkw these days, so lets take that. 50rwkW increase.

Most custom tune jobs can get done for under 1600 dollars.

1600/50 = $32/kW.

Example 2

You have a 500kw V8, and some specific modification alone gives you 600kw, at a cost of $10 grand, this is 10000/100, which is obviously $100/kw.

Percentage increase over stock, $/% increase. Using the examples above,

The Edit would be 1600/((245/195-1)x100) = $62.4 per percent.

The other would be 10000/((600/500-1)x100) = $20 per percent.

Put the 2 together and average them, gives you 47.2 and 60 bucks for each bang, for the Edit and v8 mod respectively....

For the other, its

Its simple and it works, the lower the number, the cheaper it was for each increase in power.

If you have a 10kw scooter and stick a 30kW shot nitros hit on it, then for a very short time (The time it takes for it to explode) you have 4 times the standard power... If this cost you $2000 to do, then you would have 2000/30 = $66.6/kW. But, you have 4 times the power, so 2000/((40/10-1)x100) = $6.6/%, pretty damn good. The average is 36.6 bangs for each buck...

Clearly, this scooter wins for about 0.3 of a second before it blows up, killing the rider, and padestrians from the shrapnel....

Now, we need to sort of rate this as well.

If a modification involves just a few kw at only a specific RPM range, then give it a rating out of 10 depending on how much of the rev range is improved. This is just what you personally believe the mod is worth across the board, almost like your satisfaction rating on the improvement (not the total result, but the improvement, smooth, linear, easy to use, peaky, harsh, dull, whatever. Its your opinion on the mod)..

So fire away, and put some effort into it because it would be nice to know what makes and models have similar privileges to XR6T owners....

Also, just post down the seperate results, we might have to scale the total vs percentage increase if it seems crap or unmeaningful. We can sort that out later.

[bcl]

Lawsy,

In the rex world the equivalent of the Capa edit is the Ecutek.

I’d expect a power increase of around 15-20% for a rex for around a $2k outlay, custom tuned.

That you can get so much more out of the Ford in terms of the maximum power initially is related to the fact that the Ford is a relatively low boost car to start with, (I.e starts from a lower base) and the limit of the increase is very much related to the capability of stock components.

To focus purely on power increase is selling it short. Properly tuned the Edit can provide better drivability and power delivery as well, so it’s a double bonus.

Brian

[markxr6t]

Good idea for a thread Lawsy!

Whilst your mathematical approach is most valid, my personal approach is "which reasonably priced car can be made into a reliable 12 second street car with minimum expenditure?"

And the answers just gotta be the XR6T - especially with the last few weeks and that edit-only BF auto running 12.6.

From my readings, other good bangs for buck include:

LS1s and LS2 (and no doubt the LS76) now regularly run 12s with extractors, exhaust and tune only. Not bad value for less than $3k. There's a ute over here with cams as well as the above running 11s.

The now discontinued supercharged V6 Ecowreck could be made into a low 14 second car with the simple and cheap ($600) addition of a smaller pulley on the supercharger, which increased boost to 8psi and still didn't require intercooling or other mods. that's good bang for bucks. Smaller pulleys and higher boost (10psi) required lower (?or is it higher?) ratio roller rockers, intercooling, PCM tune etc.. so it all became a bit pointless.

Japanese turbos respond well to tunes, but as BCL said, because they're running quite high boost already, you really need to upgrade turbochargers etc... I think Nissan 200sx (Silvias) respond particularly well to the old zorst and chip, but not into 12 second territory.

An unknown (to me anyway) is how well the Euro turbos respond to tunes only - like the Audi A4 Quattro Turbos, Golf Gti or even Polo Gti. They're well built to start with so they should be able to handle extra boost. Some guy has written into Wheels (April 06) I assume saying a tune only got his Polo Gti 155kw and 335Nm up from 110kw and 220NM. I don't know if its true, but if it is tune only , that's serious bang for bucks in an 1100kg car.

However, I'm not sure if Ford knew what modification monster they were creating when they bolted on the Garret Gt35/40 rated to up to 700hp. Bang for Bucks, modding the XR6T would be hard to beat anywhere in the world I reckon!

(I'm happy to be corrected on any of the above - no personal experience with these other cars - just what I've read)

And Steve (XXXR6T) must have broken the world record for Bang for Bucks on Saturday with a 35% power increase for $900!

[Paradoxx]

[Lawsy]

And Steve (XXXR6T) must have broken the world record for Bang for Bucks on Saturday with a 35% power increase for $900!

Its impossible to tell, but is he at all happy?

... Ok, originally I was also going to make the rating system a factor of the equation, because this would weed out the 'it became a pig' and 'it blew my car up' modifications.

It would have been a rating out of 10, from you the customer or researchie, then applied to this simple formula ((X/2+5)/10).

Or in words, half of your rating plus 5, out of 10.

So 1/10 becomes 5.5/10, 9/10 becomes 9.5/10 etc.

This then directly affects the results. As you can see, if you half the bang factor, then your rating is doubled.

Since we are working on a dollars/results basis, then this is bad... Its the equivelant of more dollars for the same result....

Example.

You have an old 92 1.8L SOHC charcoal astina that's done 290,000kms, burns more oil than petrol and has about 2% of its synchro's left in 1st, 2nd and 3rd gear...

... and then decided to bolt on a 500hp turbo, without changing anything else; it blows up.

Though you might have a bit of change from $3k (there are reliable drop in $2k turbo conversions available, pretty cheap, but this is a bolt on, not conversion), and you might have achieved twice your previous power (briefly), the fact that it blew up means that the satisfaction rating would be 0/10 (well it could be 10/10 depending on how you look at it). When applied, this means its 5/10, or 1/2, which doubles the rating.

What happens when you devide by half? It doubles (for the mathematically challenged here [anyone here play the pokies? Anyone?]).

You get my drift...

I'm sure if we could get people to post only about results they know of, or valid manufacturers claims (Valid: For instance, Brabus, who take already AMG fiddled mercs and turn them into monsters, they have a proven record and therefore their word stands up without too much questioning) then we will be sweet.

And Brian, the reason I included a percentage increase value is purely to factor in exactly that. Some engines come from the factory fairly worked, and some come out as lazy as a sloth. In that case I'm sure if we steriod and adrenalin inject a sloth (so long as it doesn't die) that we would get some meaningful movement out of one.

I think that if we could just get a few examples rolling then we could get some momentum, thus producing a decent list of mods and how they rate; hopefully across a fairly diverse range of cars.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Ans if Steve doesnt get his squirters and a custom tune done he really is going to get a whole lotta BANG for his bucks.... .......

[Paradoxx]

Yeah yeah

I better take out another loan