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Those results are fascinating! It's interesting to overlay the graphs from the supercharged and turbocharged S's and then switch between them!
The supercharged car is up a little on BHP, but it doesn't have that lovely flat torque curve of the turbo and it needs to be revved just a little harder to achieve similar BHP in the mid range. Interesting lack of significant flat spots for either car.
Hmmm, interesting. They seem to put forward that they are illiminating many of the external factors the Rolling Roads suffer from by taking away the Wheel/Roller interface - however, they must still be doing some 'drive train losses' calculations. BHP quoted by the manufacturer is the true power of the engine, before it enters the many various devices used to put that power down on the road - the gear box, drivshafts, hubs, wheels, tyres etc. These outputs are commonly reffered to as the 'bench' output, the engine quite literally strapped to a bench and tested rather than being installed in a car.
I wonder how many examples they test before they publish a 'base' figure? Ideally, these guys should test 10 'identical' Mini's, then publish the average perfiormane figure, and compare that to the manufacturers claim.....
All of us that have driven more than one of the same car know that they have different powers. Myself and my wife bought near identical Cooper S's at about the same time. Yet her car always felt 10% more powerful than mine - and was faster even though had heavier options.
It only sounds as if they test one car, a press car, for each type. Also, the fact that Audi's with their four wheel drive system apparently "under perform" very badly (among the worst of all against quoted figures), did make me wonder how they're calculations work in these instances.
As an Audi owner, I can attest to the fact that on a dyno, the Audi seems as if it's under-performing because of significant power losses through the drivetrain. However, at the crank, some of these cars do actually over-perform from the manufacturer's stated numbers.
It's very hard for auto manufacturers to cookie cutter their cars, especially those of the sport/performance category so that they all perform the same. There's quite a bit of variation from car to car because of calculated tolerances during the engineering process.
Talar: 2001 Audi S4 (Stock... ok... maybe not) Soffi: 2005 DS/B MCS (Stock... for now...)
Very interesting graphs indeed! I would still like to see an R56 that has been run in on there instead with 5000miles. All good fun! Very nice torque curve on the R56 but very much impressed that the facelift MCS exceeded the manufacture spec.
To be honest, while we had several reports of 1st gen MINIs going up in smoke (literally), and of course the early sparking fuel filler risk (!), I've yet to see that happen to a 2nd gen MINI. But that's beside the point, as this is really about engine tuning/claims against reality than it is anything to do with reliability.
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