With the race season over for the winter, it's time for racers to start building new setups. "Out with the old and in with the new," they say, right? So when our friend Jency from Do-It Dyno in Signal Hill, Calif., decided it was time to replace his jaw-dropping 700 wheel hp 2.0L GSR motor, we thought we should give it proper farewell, a Viking funeral fit for a legendary motor like this one. NX provided a "Gen-X" wet nitrous kit to make the beast's final dyno run a memorable one.
There is a vendetta wrinkle to this story, too. A few months back, a comment written by the publisher of a competing magazine caught my eye. In his column, he claimed to have "more horsepower in [his staff] parking lot than any of [his] competitors combined." He essentially proclaimed his team as the horsepower kings of the import magazine world. Personally, I don't think they "D-serve" that title (pun intended).
This was the plan: Take a motor that is already making 696 wheel hp, use the biggest jets the kit came with (.052 to be exact), and grab for the unit at about 7500rpm just to make sure we get a big power number whether or not the motor holds together.
Trust me, we had no intentions of keeping this motor together. The connecting rods in this setup were rated for about 100 wheel hp less than we were already making off the bottle. There is always a weakest link.
With more than 30 people there to witness the mayhem, the night turned into a huge event. A pool was even drawn to bet on the final power number, with side bets about whether the motor would hold, or which cylinder would throw a rod. Don't let the feds know, but we probably had a few hundred dollars up for grabs that night. (Do-it is a dyno shop; it's only an illegal gambling ring after hours, right Bubba?)
After a fun night full of everything that made us car guys in the first place, the motor threw a rod through the number 2 cylinder, but not before making an extraordinary 832.5 wheel hp and 529.5 lb-ft of torque.
Our "parking lot" may only contain an unprecedented N/A, pump gas, emissions passing, 311 wheel hp, 222 lb-ft DC5; a 312 wheel hp supercharged S2K; a 200-plus wheel hp Type-R EG; and an EK racecar that has anywhere from 150 to 450 wheel hp depending on the day. But we blow up an 800 wheel hp B-series for fun. Last time I checked, a certain sharp-tongued publisher wouldn't dare blow up his 5,000,000 hp Skyline in the name of a fun night and a story that is more pertinent (and entertaining) than bolting some obscure JDM intake manifold on an RB26 that none of his readers will ever have anyway.
While we believe wholeheartedly that it is unprofessional to rip on competitors in print, we are not the kind of people who will just stick our heads in the sand while shots are being fired at us. Honda Tuning is the most passionate, unadulterated, true-to-life magazine covering the scene today. The competition can, and will, keep saying otherwise. We'll continue to prove them wrong.