Old racer

[bhearts]

I work with an old racer that raced against Shelby himself. This guy has quite the car collection which includes an unrestored gt350 from the yesteryear, another similar not quite as racey mustang, a ws6 trans am, and a 2013 Shelby built gt350. We always get into heated debates about turbos. He owned a factory Ford pinto turbo, which was like a 1 of 10 ever made kind of thing. Supposedly. Which makes him a turbo pro. He describes to me how his boost reacted in that car and said that at peak rpm, the boost would drop 2-3psi because "there's just not enough exhaust gas at those rpms to keep it spinning". He's a great person, but he just cannot comprehend how e85 can be used as a race gas. According to him, "I had to rebuild that pinto turbo lots of times because back in the day we didn't realize that running them hard and shutting the engine down was a bad idea." but it didn't have an internal wastegate, just a small hole to leak exhaust gas by the exhaust wheel. Those old racers literally cannot comprehend new tech. Like how much turbo technology has changed since 1978.

[Advancedynamix]

Turbos had wastegates in '78. Lol Did he run with the early SCCA crew?

[fastivaB6TG25MR]

old turbos didnt have left handed treads on the compressor wheels so if you shut them down hard(wot to redline then let off completely to decel) the compressor wheels would work loose and chunk compressor housings. maybe thats what he meant. and all turbos need to run some kind of waste gate. highly doubt that they just ran a bleed hole being that production turbos have been around since the 1920's

[bhearts]

old turbos didnt have left handed treads on the compressor wheels so if you shut them down hard(wot to redline then let off completely to decel) the compressor wheels would work loose and chunk compressor housings. maybe thats what he meant. and all turbos need to run some kind of waste gate. highly doubt that they just ran a bleed hole being that production turbos have been around since the 1920's

He kept wasting seals.

[Flyin4stroke]

Compressor surge. They may have had a waste gate but did they have a blow-off on the intake side. When extra air gets built up and you close the throttle body that air will cause the wheel to surge if you don't remove the air from the pipe allowing it to free spool.

[sketchman]

IIRC that's why newish factory turbos had water cooling. Or people installed a turbo timer. Someone installed one in the GT sedan I had even though it had water cooling obviously. Probably hold-over thinking.

[bhearts]

He just doesn't get that maybe his boost drop was because of inefficiencies of the turbo map, instead of somehow decreased exhaust flow

[TominMO]

Man I hate old people......