This is one bloody nice Pulsar. Paul has really done some great work to this thing. It's a very long way from your average "Pulsar with a set of wheels and a body kit". And it's just as well - you wouldn't wanna have a standard Pulsar with the power it's now producing.
Standout points include a PAR straight-cut gearset, NISMO 1.5 way LSD, lightened PAR flywheel, very-close-to-solid engine mounts, R32 GTR brakes and revised suspension. It's a sweet piece of gear.
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| Serious flywheel! | Even more serious gearset! | Tidy unit |
The heart of it all is an SR20DET from a W10 Avenir. It had been fitted with a T28 turbo from a GTIR Pulsar and the time had come to upgrade the management, injectors and AFM so some more power could be squeezed from it. Paul had heard that some local geeks had been successfully playing with Nissan ECU's and so he contacted us to see if anything could be done to his car.
We decided that it was worth a go. Paul used a well proven SR20 recipe - a set of 550's, Z32 AFM and crank in some boost. Paul dropped in one day and while he fitted the injectors and AFM I went to work on the ECU. Got it running to a driveable state and then it was off to the dyno - resulting in a credible 183kw atw on a shade over 15psi. Full boost coming in at around 3500.
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| "I'll just slap these 550's in... | .. bolt this here Z32 AFM in.. | .. aaawe nuts - where do these wires go???" |
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| NIStune board fitted... | ...crank up the software.. | ...whack in some likely base maps... |
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| ...and it's off to the dyno! |
We initially tried using the N15 (1N960) ECU with a U13 image programmed into a NIStune real-time board. Seeing U13 is SR20DET it seemed like a good place to start. And it was - except we later found a strange little bug that messes things up. At slightly under 70 degrees coolant temp (during warmup cycle) the ECU would go into "limp home mode". Extremely annoying. Once the coolant temp got past this point it ran fine. Hmmmmm....
We'd not done one of these before so it was a somewhat bumpy road but we got it all working in the end. Lessons learned : don't swap images between different ECU's and always strap FWD cars when on the dyno (ahem....).
About 6 months later Paul was ready for more. Maybe my comment "Put some cams in it and you'll get another 20 at the wheels every time" gave things a nudge in the right direction! Next dyno session we went with an Avenir ECU (95N11) which happily took the U13 tune we'd already done - and got rid of the warmup bug. Unfortunately due to some finger problems on my part we couldn't do any tuning that day. We had to be happy with running it up and checking the mixtures. Which turned out to be somewhat rich.
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| Results of adding poncams |
The car was driven in this state for about 4 months before we got it in for the final tune. Mixtures were leaned out a tad and timing was tidied up a bit more. This resulted in a small gain up top on the high boost setting and quite a decent gain on the low boost setting. There's no doubt that more power could be had with more boost but Paul isn't greedy - he'd rather keep his SR going longer than harder. And a Pulsar with nearly 200kw at the wheels isn't exactly a slug.
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| Final tune |