Originally Posted by Mase

Hello all,

Well this project has been a long time in the making, and it’s now finally being buttoned up. To give you all a brief history of this project, basically I had a client of mine ask me to take on his FQ-340 project when I was over in London, England tuning cars early 2006. He was unhappy with the way his previous setup came out, so decided to ship the car over.

Some of you may know, but many do not know about this car, so I’ve decided to make a nice compilation of the build/mods/pics/videos. I had many ask me to write a rather extensive documentary of the build and post it up here, so I’m finally getting around to doing so. So if you aren’t ready for a Novel, you might want to just scroll down for the pics/videos. This wasn’t a quick project, so it will be a long sequence of written events.

The owner had a goal in mind. Not only did he want a car he could drive on the street normally, but attended all types of weekend hot spots whether it be a drag strip, road race, or just personal enjoyment. He also wanted this FQ to be built for Cannonball Type runs. It has an auxiliary fuel tank in the trunk to hold an additional 15 gallons of fuel so he could go quite a distance with the car and not run out of fuel.

Secondly, he needed the car to go fast top end, yet still on pump gas, over in Europe, its difficult to find race gas, not only is it very expensive, it would be hard to travel across countries and find it. He also wanted a well handling car, broad power band, all with great drivability. It will see road courses, drag strips, and of course lots of highways.

Our goal: 500 awhp on my dyno dynamics dynamometer 93 octane

So here I was, in a world of possibilities, the owner left most of the performance mods up to me, and this is how it currently goes:

Mod List:

JUN 2.2 Liter Stroker Kit
Cosworth Cylinder Head
JUN 272 Cams
Modified JUN Solid Lifter Kit
Full-Race Exhaust Manifold
Full-Race Downpipe (Modified in house)
Garrett GT35R
HKS Intercooler
Custom Aluminum Intercooler Piping (Built in house)
AEM EMS
RC 1000cc Injectors
Apexi AVCR
Magnus Intake Manifold
Exedy Twin
Quaife Front Differential
DSS Axles
Super AYC Controller
PSS9 Bilstein Suspension
Cusco Front and Rear Sway Bars
AP Racing 6 Pot Front Brakes
Tarox 10 Pot Rear Brakes


Further, to give everyone a break down on my choices when it came to building this car, there are a few things I would like to point out. I chose the 2.2L 94mm stroke because I knew the car would need to rev high, the 2.3L crank has a hair longer stroke, which would increase the piston speeds even higher. The design of the JUN crank is second to none compared to other cranks I have seen. (pics posted below). With this added displacement, it helped aid to an already responsive motor.

Now onto the top half of the motor. I had heard rumors about cosworth coming out with a cylinder head right when I started shopping for parts. Thanks to Andy Chan, we got some of the first cylinder heads, and I have to say I’ve been seriously impressed with their work. After getting pictures of the head earlier in 2006 and viewing the flow charts, I was sold. And have been pleased ever since.

Many people always ask, why a 35r? If you need serious power, why not a bigger turbo? Easy answer. Versatility. We chose the 35r for several reasons, its extremely responsive w/ the 2.2 Stroker. It meets our power goals with ease. The transient response of that turbo is among the best I’ve seen.

This project wasn’t a complete breeze by any means. It required many sleepless nights planning and calculating exactly how I wanted to build this motor. I’m not a professional engine builder, but I have enough background building a few motors, being an engineer, I felt capable of taking on the task. I sat down and computed exact specs for what I wanted each parameter to be. I took into account all the manufactures recommendations, my own accounts, as well as many others recommendations. I was open to all suggestions on how to build the best motor I knew how. It needed to be loose enough to sustain the heat we were going to be putting through it, yet tight enough it didn’t smoke like all these ‘race’ motors popping out everywhere. Further, one of the more stressful aspects, the bearing clearances. The most common failures I see are bearing failures. The JUN crank is a very expensive crank, the car will be running high RPMs for a sustained amount of time. As the old saying goes, a tighter motor will last longer, a looser motor will make more power. Well I needed to make the motor last, but make great power. In the end, I spent forever getting the specs right where I wanted them, I about wore out my micrometers and couldn’t tell you how many sleeves of plastigage I went through. It took getting OEM bearings from Europe and many weeks of trying a few different sets, just to get it matched to my perfection.

The other hardship of the build was the Solid Lifters. These were a huge time consumption. JUN supplied the solid lifters, along with shims to set the different clearances. Once I got the long block assembled, I started to tackle this little mod. Boy I had no idea how time consuming it was going to be. JUN had only supplied me one size of shims, and upon emailing them asking for the correct specs, they asked me to send the head back for them to install and correctly shim the head. I wasn’t going to send a brand new cosworth head across the country. Not to mention, I knew the head when breaking in would change the clearances a bit. When I started measuring the clearances, I found barely any of the same size shims they provided fit the proper specs. Thanks to Dwight (our head fabricator and master mechanic here at Stage 6 Motorsports), he quickly pointed out they were just Nissan sr20 shims. I ordered a variety of Nissan shims at $8 a piece, a true rip off for an ounce of metal. Long story short, some of the valve stem heights on the intake side of the cosworth head, were still pretty high, I ended up having to modify these lifters myself, about 20 hours worth of work. Not fun, but they are working out quite well.

So by now, you are probably wondering exactly how it turned out. The tuning side of things, naturally was a breeze due to my experience w/ tuning. On some c16, the car made:



Power was very stout, 600 awhp and 495 ft/lbs of torque. The only flaw of this dyno chart, the boost fell off on top end about 2 psi to about 27 psi, but I later fixed it by adding some duty % to the AVCR on the street. Otherwise, it holds power till 8500 rpms when the boost level is completely straight. This is straight boost, no other power adders, no meth, no nitrous. For those who don’t know about Dyno Dynamics Dyno’s, they read about 15% lower than your generic dynojet. The injectors are maxed at that level, which is ok, because this is well beyond our goals. We reached 520 awhp on straight 93 pump gas at about 21-22 psi. Mission Accomplished.

Now on to the more interesting part PICTURES and VIDEOS

















Videos:

Dyno Video (note, my dyno is a constant acceleration rate, it doesn’t increase like dynojets do. This means it doesn’t appear to make the car look as powerful due to the steady rate of acceleration)
Click here to see Video

Some other action (650+ whp supra, 460 whp mustang cobra, 500 whp red supra)

Click here to see Video

I will try to post up more videos soon, just busy with everything in the world right now.

I must give many thanks to a lot of people. I started this project on my own, but since have teamed up with Stage 6 Motorsports in august, and the whole team there has really been a great help and support. People I owe thanks to (besides the owner of the vehicle): Stage 6 Motorsports staff (Dwight, Ricky, Jim, Leland, and Travis), My family, Takahiro Nakamura of Mitsubishi Japan, Andrew Mann of the UK, Nick Ponder of warehouse motors, Dennis Eusebio for the photography, Steve from VT, Andy Chan from speed element, Amber, and Stevo for the videos.


Regards,

Mase
Stage 6 Motorsports