Sports Sedan Forum

Is there any truth in the rumour that they [v8 lovers ] controllers of the sport sedan series are going to cut the boost allowed on a 20b turbo in the sport sedan class ? ;)
are the big bangers starting to get scared that a 20b turbo might beat them
:p ? To my knowledge no rotary has had top 3 finish for years if at all . At least wait until they beat the v8s before you start robbing them of horsepower. Don't get me wrong I love the big bangers and thats what I go to see but I like a good contest at the same time
" Sport Sedans a class that has no boundaries"
think outside the box other wise you'll end up with 30 odd mustangs made by some millionaire racing around as the sport sedan series
regards olden05

Short answer is NO, unless the turbo guys want to relax the engine size rule, then the answer will probably be yes.
Some do but most do not want it changed so we are happy to leave it where it is now.
The V8 guys are not asking for 7 litres and if they did the rules would have to change fo rthem to keep the HP at where it is now.
Bigger engines were allowed in Sprintcars in recent years and the experts tell me it did nothing but cost more money. Same people winning, just going faster and having bigger crashes.
Sports Sedans have to have boundaries, even formula 1 has boundaries.
The turbo cars are not going down the straights slower, so if they are not winning it is because they are not going around the corners quicker than TonyR.

thats bull. there not getting OUT of the corners quicker than Tony R or any other chev out there... that is why they are not winning. Do we remember when one finally was beating tony??? what happened? every lap onto the main straight the turbo couldnt get out of the corner like the chev and the chev went back past.

for those of you who dont know i am graham smiths son. If we could exit a corner anywhere near any of the chevs out there i guarantee we can put the car on the first few rows of the grid any track in oz. We have incar footage from nearly every track now and at every track its the same thing. We get murdered out of any long corner or any very slow corner and that is solely due to running our turbo engine. corner entry we lose nothing, braking we lose nothing, top speed we gain. corner exit out of for example both hairpins at mallala we lose anywhere from minimum 4 to 8 carlengths.
Now this is not our rear end setup as we have used this setup with other engines and have had excellent results.
People dont seem to realise a turbo car wins races as it uses its high end horspower. where as a n/a car uses its torque and driveability to win over a turbo. Now a few turbo cars have shown they can rocket away in a straight line and people are jumping to conclusions that these peoples cars must be s*** handlers as why arent they winning? and how can we restrict this problem before they get their cars handling. It aint that way. i read that the turbo engines would be allowed 30 odd hp more than a chev. we need alot more than that to keep up with a v8.
I wish we could stick all the people who dont understand this in one of these cars then they might go home and leave the issue.

If we restrict boost how the hell are you going to do it? For instance we run 25psi in our car, Trent runs 15psi, i dont know what bobby runs but when john keen had it the car ran 35-37psi. every engine runs different boost if we set a benchmark you will have to throw away half the engines people can use. Or are people planning on screwing the boost back on individual cars till a chev can beat it again?

This is not clear at all in barry's proposal. In the proposal it does talk about trent and how can we restrict him as people believe with more money and time his car couild become a real threat. As you say olden 05 why resterict it before it even gets there?? its been allowed to run in the old rules you cant hit him with something now.

This is what needs to happen. The category has relaxed the rule of multivalve thus allowing up to 3.5 litre turbo engines. Now one of these engine would ALMOST solve our corner exit problem and would also give us TOO bigger horsepower gap over the chevs. Now boost limits will not solve this. Who is it up to to say ok you can only have say 780bhp and thats all you get coz thats what a chev has? when they will still be completely different engines? you cant do that fairly.
Restricting horsepower though is alomst the same thing as adding weight. However weight would be a fairer option as i have said before different engines need different boost and different horspower to work. you will still get some of these engines flying past down a straight but cant get out of corners. If they start wiping the floor add more weight. Its easily policable too. There are lots of tricks to hide how much boost you run. it will be very complicated to monitor this. trent doesnt even log it.

Any car that has always been legal to run WITH the multivalve rule implied should not now recieve any restrictions. That means every turbo car currently running. I agree anything requiring the multivalve rule be removed to run SHOULD gain a penalty but only in the way of weight.

if this is the way the 'people who are trying to restrict' meant it to be, good. but they definately havent made that clear as at the moment we feel like a boost restriction is being implied on us??? if we are restricted we may aswell throw our engine away now. As for us to go past a top chev in a straight line we have to have our boost screwed right up. Without better fuel we cant go furthur anyway.


One thing i would like to add is that we ban antilag before someone with enough money comes along to run it. We would LOVE anti lag but it destroys turbos and manifolds and would add HUGE costs.

ive ranted enough

am i wrong in some of this?

With respect i have to ask , based on what you have said, why not put a v8 back into the car ? if this will get you racing up at the pointy end of the field.

I have to say it is pretty ridiculous that some restrictive rule changes are being floated because some guys are "worried" that a car with a turbo engine will beat them. The facts are the turbo cars are closer to the front now days but they have not run away from the pack and dominated the races.The rules should only be altered to even up the field when this becomes the case, not because it is "feared" that it will happen.

Also seriously is it Trent Youngs fault that he has thought outside the square and built a competitive car that is also more cost effective (his whole 20B engine and turbo setup wouldn't be anywhere near the cost of a top line chev), sounds more like sour grapes to me!!

The boost limit is not the solution, if you want to implement that then all the V8s should have a compression ratio limit too. Of the three turbo cars running in the national series you couldn't really get 3 more varied combinations (2.5 litre V6 twin turbo, 2 litre 4 cylinder single turbo and triple rotor single turbo) so how can you determine what level of boost will be fair for three very different setups?
Also keep in mind that on a rotary radically changing the compression ratio is not an option, no such thing as aftermaket forged rotors unfortunately!

Also how is a boost limit going to be effectively policed, it will mean all the turbo cars will need to have the same data logger (independent of the EFI system) which an official will need to check after every qualifying session and race, who is going to do this?

My take on it is this:
- Leave the current weight classes in place with no restrictions on boost, RPM,
compression ratio, etc Seems to be working well at the moment.

- Lower the capacity limit for a multi valve turbo to 3.0 litres. It would attract the two most popular turbo performance Japanese engines, the 2.6 litre RB26 from the Nissan GTR and the 3.0 litre 2JZ Toyota Supra engine. Both of these are readily available, have great aftermarket performance part support and can be cost effectively built.

- If the turbo cars over 2.5 up to 3.0 litres have to much speed they should be hit with a weight penalty calculated against their engine capacity that will bring them back to the field.

Thoughts?

I always thought that you run what you have brung!!. I was wondering when a 20B turbo was going to hit the track, let alone another 300ZX V6 twin turbo, like Keith Carlings, don't get me wrong, i think you can't beat cubic inches, but the turbo's, just have that whistle which is so distinctive. and I love the competition between the n/a cars and turbos is a good thing. What are the rules at the moment, with n/a cars 2 valve is a maximum of 6 litres, a multivalve is that 4 litres, and a turbo has a multiplication down from x 1.4 to x 1.3 (as long as it does not exceed 6 litres I think.... is this correct). Besides the different makes, shapes of body styles, the engine and drivetrain packages make this category appealing for me. the freedom of choice, and to stop something that hasn't even had a run/race yet, seems to be a bit premature, just hope that the car(s) get a run with their true configuration before they get handicapped, whether by turbo restrictions, or as per Mr Boost and 2002 turbo, start applying weight penalties. This could be applied at the end of every race or meeting, and reviewed at the same time of the penalties are given to the cars. The downside to this though, is that someone could sandbag themselves so they have the weight removed/no penalty applied. I hope that this would not happen, as I love seeing a race being fought as hard as it can be. Just Tony was not so much better than everybody else, he was more consistent over the series, so it would have been interesting to see how he would have gone over the series with penalties applied. Now I do not race at this point in time, which i hope i can build/buy a car within the next 2 years, and i was thinking about running a lexus 4 litre V8 with a turbo or twin turbo setup, but this sounds as though that this would not be passed. Mind you I would be looking at any engine combo before and the rules before building it. If I have misquoted the rules, I apologize as I haven't read them for a few years, and I wasn't until I got close to buying/building a car. Please correct me if I am wrong as I would like to know what the latest changes are to the category.

ICE because unfortunately to be competitive with a v8 you need to be completely ripped off to make the 750 odd hp you need to be competitive. We also really enjoy racing something we mostly hand built rather than bought.

i have heard that a top sports sedan chev is generally 75k ++ i can build our whole engine brand new for under 30k. and on top of that our engine has never actually blown up. It dropped a valve once but this was due to a faulty valve which could happen to any engine. and then it melted a piston because the injectors were too small. Other than that its been bullet proof. BUT if it DID blow up it would cost me under 15 for a complete rebuild. Try that with a chev

Apart from that we ran a chev for a year and graham became bored with it. It threw a leg out of bed and there was no way we were bothering to rebuild it. If you ask anyone who has raced with a turbo car and a chev which one is more enjoyable or more to the point challenging to drive im sure you will get a 90% hands up for the turbo.

But then again its all just personal choice and i definately love the chevs, there a mean ass engine. Jus couldnt drag me away from the violent whistler's

if you built a lexus engine you would have to reduce the capacity to 3.5L anyway to be eligible. and you can gaurantee you will sink all the money into it and be restricted till you come 2nd.
The main argument of all this is to not let new things in that will clean up a chev, as then the chevs will become redundant and theres so much money invested in too many sports sedans running chevs to let that happen, which is fair enough. But what about in 10 years? are we still going to keep the dinosaurs as the benchmark?

From a spectator's point of view. Nothing beats watching Graham Smiths Calibra come onto Boost out of the final turn at Oran Park or Turn 2 at Eastern Creek. The only other cars that behave so violently in that way is the little Bimmer of Gattermier and the Red Bimmer with the Supra engine in it that also runs in the NSW series. They look a handle full to drive those two cars when the boost comes on.

I may have missed something but has Trent got a new wizz bang 20B in his car this year that some of the Chev drivers are a little concerned with?? Mr Boost will you be making an appearance in the two National rounds at Oran Park & Eastern Creek this year in the Fiat?