My big fat Japanese turbo

When I first had a much larger turbo installed in

my car (I had already replaced the stock turbo

with a mild upgrade and decided I wanted to go

big this time), the tuner and I were out on a long,

straight, and desolate road with no one around

for miles and no turns or bumps to worry about.

Just us and a long stretch of pavement. Mounted

directly in my field of vision on the steering column

was a brightly lit boost gauge. My tuner turned to

me and said, “Listen, David, I’ve got the datalog-

ging equipment all set up, wideband and laptop

are here in my lap, and I have the handheld con-

troller for your ECU . . . I need you to do one thing:

Drive in a straight line at full throttle and tell me

what the peak boost reads on the boost gauge.”

Sounds simple enough, right? After all, I had been

driving turbo cars for years. How hard could it

be to drive in a straight line and tell him what the

dial right in front of my face reads? Turns out I

couldn’t do it. Off boost, I had no problem looking

at the gauge, but when boost came on, the car

accelerated so violently, literally jumping side-

ways as the turbo came on, that for the life of me

I couldn’t look down at the gauge. After about the

sixth or seventh attempt, I was finally able to give

him a reading — 18 psi. “Okay,” he said, “Let’s see

how we do at 22 psi. . . .”

Boost became an event, not an aid in acceler-

ating. The car felt nothing like it had before with

either of the prior turbos. There was none of the

seamless acceleration I had become accus-

tomed to, making my four-cylinder engine feel

like a bigger six- or eight-cylinder powerplant.

Instead, it felt like I was driving a donkey cart

and then got rear-ended by a Mack truck.

As time went on, I came to find myself driving

20, 30, or 40 miles without once hitting boost. I

could shift the car gently, and never once wake

the turbo. Rather than driving more aggressively,

I found myself driving around the turbo when

just getting from point A to point B. Where I used

to hit boost 20–40 times during a longer commute,

after installing the huge turbo, I would use boost

once or not at all. Around town, I wouldn’t hit it at

all. I found it fascinatingly ironic that a ridiculous

amount of power made me a much more sedate

driver

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