Boosting your stock motor means you can double your horsepower

Taking a car that engineers have spent thousands of hours getting right, and then strapping on a turbocharger or supercharger and attempting to double the factory horsepower, sounds like a great way to waste thousands of dollars dealing with busted engines. However, as many have already proven, you can radically improve a car's power output without driving over your own crankshaft.

After deciding to sample BRZ/86 life, MOOG wasn't blown away by the Toyota/Subaru coupe's performance as a stock car. He fixed that last week when he fitted an SME turbo kit (watch the episode HERE) and a Gen II Garrett turbocharger to the WR Blue two-door, but many felt he was going to spend the following days draining con rods out of his sump. 

This week the lads headed down to PVS to get the new set-up tuned and to see how many extra llamathrusts the SME turbo kit had unleashed. WIth around 150kW standard (depending on your year model) at the engine, and around 100kW at the rear wheels, hopes were high MOOG's WRX-smasher would now make around 200rwkW, but you can see how it all goes down HERE.

One of the secrets to Stock Bottom End (SBE) combos that are now the talk ofthe internet is how carefully modern ECUs (like the Haltech Elite 2500 Marty uses in Supergramps) means tuners have far greater ability to control the engine's fuelling, ignition timing, and boost maps. If you have tight control of how much fuel you can push into your car, or how you can fine-tune your ignition timing, and scale the boost in, you can tune around engine shortcomings and extend the engine's life.  

The quality of parts used in engines, as well as the design of cylinder heads, variable cam technology, and more, over the last 20-30 years also allows power fiends to squeeze their stock motors for all the juice they can get, without knocking a hole in the starter motor using a con rod. 

Boost-friendly fuels like E85 also greatly improve the safety net for engines being tuned for performance, providing far greater protection against engine-killing pre-ignition detonation. It all adds up to seeing crazy things like people making up to four-times the stock power output on a stock block, with factory crank, rods and pistons!