Top Gear Race Spark

**cripple_rooster** · November 24th, 2011 05:19 PM

Originally Posted by niky

There's always the extra care you have to take with a turbocharger in a tropical country like the Philippines... proper warm-up and cool-down procedures... regularly checking your oil... and more frequent oil changes.

A wet nitrous system is basically plug and play... and at the low setting they have theirs (10 seconds to 100 km/h... so probably from 85 hp to around 110...), there's not much stress on the engine.

I'm currently also living in a tropical country (Brazil). As far as the oil goes, an oil cooler can be added. Also, not every turbo setup must be so extreme... At least for me, the main advantage from the turbo setup is the lower power loss while driving uphills as I usually have to do.

**niky** · November 25th, 2011 10:48 AM

Originally Posted by cripple_rooster

I'm currently also living in a tropical country (Brazil). As far as the oil goes, an oil cooler can be added. Also, not every turbo setup must be so extreme... At least for me, the main advantage from the turbo setup is the lower power loss while driving uphills as I usually have to do.

Personally, I would have gone for the turbo, too. Get a Kei car turbo or aftermarket turbo sized for the Suzuki Wagon R and variants and you've got something that will nicely fill the hole in the torque band of the GM 1.2.

But this is first and foremost a show car. Getting it done and getting the bragging numbers under a budget were more important than actually making the car consistently fast.

**Stoner** · November 25th, 2011 02:21 PM

'Race' Spark is a misnomer. Should only be 'Tuned' Spark. Immediately tagging it as 'Race' in its current setup is a little bit laughable.

**uls** · November 25th, 2011 02:50 PM

pwede na yung mga mods kahit wala nitrous

0-100kph 15.1 sec stock naging 12.3 sec with mods (no nitrous)

malaking improvement yan ah

**niky** · November 25th, 2011 03:58 PM

Take note... gentle launch yun. That way they can show off the big increase in low-rpm and midrange power that the Unichip generally gives. A wheel-spinning launch (which would give you about 13.8 seconds with that particular blue Spark) would be faster, but there, driving technique would muddy up the results.

It's also worth noting the jelly soft engine mounts of the Spark are not well-suited to drag racing.

I expect that with the nitrous and some poly-urethane engine mounts, high-8 to 9 second 0-100 times are possible if you don't give a crap about the clutch. Which would peg the peak power at around 120-125 hp overall.