[TurboGT]

In August of 2016 my wife got rid of her old rusted out Oldsmobile in favor of her first "newer" car, a 2012 Chevy Cruze RS with the 1.4 turbo and auto trans. She bought it CPO and had an additional warranty to over 100,000 miles. Its a really nice car and we both still like it, but her biggest complaint from the beginning has been how horribly underpowered the car is. These cars put something like 105 horsepower at the wheels and only make the situation worse by shifting at 6500 when the power falls off a cliff at 5500.

After 5 years and 80,000 miles of ownership its time to fix that. The stock turbo is probably better sized for a golf cart than a car engine, and they crack internally due to the extreme restriction where the 4 cylinders merge in the hotside. After some research I found ZZP makes their "Big wheel v3" turbo which is what we might consider to be a "hybrid" turbo in our realm. It comes with larger wheels than stock and it has a custom made-for-them hotside with a much larger a/r to help fix the cracking and promote better exhaust flow to the larger turbine. That was the end goal.

(Not pictured) last summer i scored a k&n cold air intake and BNR downpipe off craigslist. That got the ball rolling on the supporting mods. The car felt a little bit quicker on stock tune.


Over winter i adressed the stock intercooler (which is worse than ours) by installing a ZZP front mount intercooler.

Well fast forward not long ago, the car started losing power and setting p0299 underboost code. After inspection found the turbo had the dreaded crack. Its upgrade time!

Now all that was left to do was the turbo, 42# injectors and custom tune. Those were purchased last week and showed up Yesterday.

This morning i got aquainted with HPtuners, copied and emailed the factory PCM and TCM files to ZZP, and hopefully they will send me a base file monday.

Got the new turbo installed as well as addressed a few oil leaks and a coolant housing replaced at the same time.

ZZP shows this turbo making 235whp on ethanol, i'm hoping it'll do 200whp on 93, which is tremendous considering that'll be DOUBLE what it makes stock. Looking forward to the tuning process and seeing how this thing runs! Wife will be super happy i'm sure. I'll have to update with a video or two once tuning is done. Who knows, might even make a dragstrip pass as well!

 

[86BlueCobra]

That intercooler makes the stock Focus ST intercooler look like a beast.
Looks like a fun build. Hopefully your wife likes it.

 

[TurboGT]

That intercooler makes the stock Focus ST intercooler look like a beast.
Looks like a fun build. Hopefully your wife likes it.

Not only that, but it sits BEHIND the ac condensor (hence the picture of all the coolers ripped out). You see which engineer won that design, the one who cared more about air conditioning.

Meant to say, the intercooler also made another small, but noticeable difference. It "hit" the next gear harder on wide open throttle shifts, indicating to me that it was no longer pulling as much power at the top of the rpm band due to high charge temps.

 

[Duece McCracken]

Not only that, but it sits BEHIND the ac condensor (hence the picture of all the coolers ripped out). You see which engineer won that design, the one who cared more about air conditioning.

Meant to say, the intercooler also made another small, but noticeable difference. It "hit" the next gear harder on wide open throttle shifts, indicating to me that it was no longer pulling as much power at the top of the rpm band due to high charge temps.

So when are you going back to back on the rollers?

 

[TurboGT]

So when are you going back to back on the rollers?

If i were to guess, It probably already had high charge temps by 2nd gear. Considering the amount of time the car spends at full throttle, this is crucial.

 

[Duece McCracken]

If i were to guess, It probably already had high charge temps by 2nd gear. Considering the amount of time the car spends at full throttle, this is crucial.

ST vs Cruze Dyno day is what Im saying, lol

 

[TurboGT]

ST vs Cruze Dyno day is what Im saying, lol

Ohhh! Probably will happen, just not sure when. If that Powermax comes out, ill pick that bad boy up, and then can get raw numbers on both cars.

 

[W4R]

If i were to guess, It probably already had high charge temps by 2nd gear. Considering the amount of time the car spends at full throttle, this is crucial.

Considering 100 HP stock lol I doubt it would come to that lol

 

[xTheMan42]

Just read this title and realized "Penelope Cruz".

Sigh.

 

[FunkyZero]

ZZP shows this turbo making 235whp on ethanol, i'm hoping it'll do 200whp on 93, which is tremendous considering that'll be DOUBLE what it makes stock. Looking forward to the tuning process and seeing how this thing runs! Wife will be super happy i'm sure. I'll have to update with a video or two once tuning is done. Who knows, might even make a dragstrip pass as well!

I just bought my kid a '14 Cruz 1.4t. He'll get no such upgrades.
We've been going through it doing brakes, fluids, tires and whatnot, getting it ready for his daily. He gets his license in about 3 more weeks.
It's a decent driving little sedan for as light as it is. And frankly, I got it for him BECAUSE it is a gutless wonder. Plenty of power for tooling around and sipping fuel, but not nearly enough for outright debauchery. Of course, I remember the trouble I caused with an old Mustang 2.3 5-speed back in the mid 80's... never underestimate a teenager I suppose.

 

[TurboGT]

Just read this title and realized "Penelope Cruz".

Sigh.

That's her doing, not mine. Lol.

 

[TurboGT]

I just bought my kid a '14 Cruz 1.4t. He'll get no such upgrades.
We've been going through it doing brakes, fluids, tires and whatnot, getting it ready for his daily. He gets his license in about 3 more weeks.
It's a decent driving little sedan for as light as it is. And frankly, I got it for him BECAUSE it is a gutless wonder. Plenty of power for tooling around and sipping fuel, but not nearly enough for outright debauchery. Of course, I remember the trouble I caused with an old Mustang 2.3 5-speed back in the mid 80's... never underestimate a teenager I suppose.

The car is still capable of triple digit speeds stock, make no mistake. It just takes its sweet time getting there. There has to be some degree of trust.

Of course i was 16 with my '96 v8 mustang (which i still have 15 years later). It was slow at the time but i built it on my teenage fulltime job budget to run low 14s. Even then, I wasnt super aggressive on the street with it, i was too afraid to get the car impounded and lose my only source of freedom-my license.

My dad was an old hotrodder himself and knows what its all about, but for some reason trusted me enough To have a car like that at that age and for that i am thankful.

 

[FunkyZero]

The car is still capable of triple digit speeds stock, make no mistake. It just takes its sweet time getting there. There has to be some degree of trust.

Of course i was 16 with my '96 v8 mustang (which i still have 15 years later). It was slow at the time but i built it on my teenage fulltime job budget to run low 14s. Even then, I wasnt super aggressive on the street with it, i was too afraid to get the car impounded and lose my only source of freedom-my license.

My dad was an old hotrodder himself and knows what its all about, but for some reason trusted me enough To have a car like that at that age and for that i am thankful.

The ol 4cyl Mustang was just my first holdover, handed down. My dad used it as a daily for years. I gave it to my sister when I was done with it. Last I saw it, it was so rusty you could see in one side and out the other and it was creeping up just short of 300K miles, but it was limping pretty bad by then.
I drove it for about 6mo until I got a better car, which was a Lime Green/Black '72 Mach 1. My guess is that your 5.0 was probably faster, but it did at least have the 4 speed/ 351. in '85, it was already a somewhat rare car in it's condition. I always wanted a 69 or 70, but those were already going for pretty big money when I was a teenager so I had to settle with the 72 at the time.
There's no way I would turn one of my boys loose in something like that. They appear to have a bit of a wild streak, and it's been challenging to keep them reeled in. I'm sure our insurance would already be cancelled by now.

 

[TurboGT]

Base tune came in!

Did a quick spark plug change to one step colder plugs, and an oil change to feed the new turbo some fresh synthetic.

Took it for a nice long drive while datalogging (they want everything. idle, light accel, moderate accel, full throttle, and steady cruise). The first stop-stab dumped so much fuel that the car blew a big cloud of black smoke, fell on its face and misfired till it cleared the cylinders. Had to roll into the WOT pulls after that. Car has about the same power as stock on this base tune. Looking forward to seeing how much better it pulls as they make revisions!

 

[TurboGT]

Got the first revision loaded and took it out for some more logs. Car pulls much better than it ever has and actually makes power to 6500 for the first time in it's life. Showing 15 psi boost and 17.7 lb/min of airflow, so we're about 40 flywheel horsepower more than stock at this point. Timing is pretty low at this point though and only getting a couple degrees of KR above 6500.

Considering most stock turbo tunes on these cars end up around 20 to 21psi, im hoping this turbo will see similar boost levels if not more.

 

[TurboGT]

Forgot to update last night. With the first Revision, and yesterday's revision, the car hits a bad power cut on the 2-3 upshift. You can see in the middle of the pull I have the cursor on in the pic in my post above, there's a huge drop with all pids. Yesterday's revision did take care of an over-cycling bypass valve which leads to jerky acceleration (which it also does on stock tune).

Well, i was eagerly awaiting another revision today, but that didn't happen. Tomorrow's Another day.

 

[Duece McCracken]

Forgot to update last night. With the first Revision, and yesterday's revision, the car hits a bad power cut on the 2-3 upshift. You can see in the middle of the pull I have the cursor on in the pic in my post above, there's a huge drop with all pids. Yesterday's revision did take care of an over-cycling bypass valve which leads to jerky acceleration (which it also does on stock tune).

Well, i was eagerly awaiting another revision today, but that didn't happen. Tomorrow's Another day.

Likely story...

 

[TurboGT]

Got another revision today. They're starting to turn the wick up now. Finally broke 20 lb/min (200 flywheel horsepower) and we're currently at 18psi.

The 2-3 shift power cut still exists. Although it got better. I see he tried spiking timing during the shift to see if it would compensate. It was pulling loads of timing during this issue last 2 revisions. Something i noticed Was the 1-2 and 3-4 shift are around 6700 and the 2-3 is at 6900. Im wondering If its just touching the upper control Limits of the PCM and its freaking out? Or touching the rev limiter one time? I asked about moving shift points down to 6500 to see (it feels like it could use a slightly earlier shift anyway, by seat of the pants). I'll see if he's on board.

I immediately got an auto-generated email stating they were dealing with an overwhelming amount of orders and remote tunes and are around 24 hours behind. I hope they don't rush through this because of the workload. I'd rather it take longer and be done right.

 

[Duece McCracken]

Got another revision today. They're starting to turn the wick up now. Finally broke 20 lb/min (200 flywheel horsepower) and we're currently at 18psi.

The 2-3 shift power cut still exists. Although it got better. I see he tried spiking timing during the shift to see if it would compensate. It was pulling loads of timing during this issue last 2 revisions. Something i noticed Was the 1-2 and 3-4 shift are around 6700 and the 2-3 is at 6900. Im wondering If its just touching the upper control Limits of the PCM and its freaking out? Or touching the rev limiter one time? I asked about moving shift points down to 6500 to see (it feels like it could use a slightly earlier shift anyway, by seat of the pants). I'll see if he's on board.

I immediately got an auto-generated email stating they were dealing with an overwhelming amount of orders and remote tunes and are around 24 hours behind. I hope they don't rush through this because of the workload. I'd rather it take longer and be done right.

Daddy like...

 

[TurboGT]

Thankfully despite the warning of their workload, they managed to send me another revision this morning. He backed power off, only running around 18 lb/min, lets hope just for testing. He did make some changes that reduced the 2-3 power cut, and actually one of my pulls it didnt exist at all. He didnt change shift point at all like I'd hoped.

I don't like working in this direction. I really hope he can get this fixed so we can get back on the right path. Im really hoping this thing will be in the 23 lb/min when all is said and done. I know this turbo will push at least 26+ on ethanol.

Edit: i did forget that if he was messing with MAF scaling, that airlfow readings would be skewed. Lets hope that is the case. My butt dyno isnt super accurate, but i will say that it never broke traction in 1st today, which it did some light turning of the tires yesterday.