It's weird, people see my kids driving an 1100 horsepower car.
We're here at LS Fest West with Rick Squires, debuting our new partnership with STS turbos
and Holley Performance.
Rick was kind enough to bring on his 2008 ZR7 Corvette that just happens to sport twin
rear mounted turbos.
Rick, I've seen them around the industry for years but I have to ask you, why rear mounted
turbos?
You know that is a big question that we get.
First, if you've ever seen under the hood of a Corvette, where are you going to put
them?
It's a little cramped, isn't it?
Everything's made of plastic and you put a couple of turbos the size of a basketball
that are going to turn bright yellow and catch everything on fire.
You'll be oozing plastic.
So the installation process is so much easier when we put them where there is room, the
turbo is actually a great muffler and so we can take the mufflers off and replace the
turbo in the spot where the mufflers is and it makes the car sound amazing and there's
our real estate where we put it in so we don't have to cut and chop and do all those things
that some of the other companies have to do.
I'm sure there are some other benefits too being there not in the hot engine bay, they're
getting extra air back there probably.
Oh yeah, the turbo is on vacation right?
It's used to running at over 2,000 degrees and turning bright yellow, coking the oil
when you shut off, you have to have turbo timers and all those things.
Our turbos, they look the same on the dyno as they do sitting in the box, they don't
even change colors, they run at a lot lower temperature.
So that's definitely a benefit, a lot lower temperatures, probably a lot cooler intake
charge as well.
Yeah, all the heat soak capability of a front mount system where you've got two being packed
in there with the turbos, everything under the hood and just everything gets hotter than
hot and so you have to have this massive inter-cooler to try and get that temperature down where
we've got the turbos in the back so the temperature coming out is cooler to start with and as
they go through the tubing up to the front, it's what we call passive inter-cooling, where
we shed a lot of that real hot heat out on the way to the inter-cooler, then we run a
lot cooler temperature into the inter-cooler so our temperatures coming out of the inter-cooler
are really close to ambient actually.
Really?
Yeah, so the horsepower boost is huge.
Rick, I'm sure you get this question a lot, but the turbos are all the way in the back
of the car, intake is all the way in the front.
I know what you are going to say.
Turbo lag.
Yep, turbo lag.
You know and we get that question all the time, people see the visible length and go
wow, how long does this take for this to get that air all the way up there?
And if you think about the exhaust coming out of the engine, how long does it take before
it leaves that exhaust valve till it goes out the tailpipe at wide open throttle?
Not very long.
It's that fast, and so it's really not an issue of length, I mean you even look at a
pro-mod car, the size of tubing on a pro-mod car is 5-6 inches and it runs from the turbo
up at the grill clear into the back of the car where they've got a huge water-air inter-cooler
that's like a 55 gallon drum right?
Then it has to go all the way back up and how long does it take those to come on boost.
Not very long.
It's less than 6 seconds because they are over 200 miles by that point right?
that's right.
So it's more of a turbo sizing issue, you know you can have turbo lag on a conventional
front mount system too, you put too much turbo on there, you are going to have lag and so
it's matching components.
The engineering that we do with our customers is we help them so they don't have to drive
and figure out which turbo is going to work, we've done all that.
You've done all the engineering and R&D work.
Yeah, we've done all that for them and if they have a special application, we help with
that so we know how our systems work and we're engineering them so that they perform awesome.
That's great because there is a lot of voodoo out there with turbos.
Well, and it's turbos, there is a little voodoo in turbos anyway because a lot of people don't
understand how they work.
So, Rick, this system is essentially the same system that's under the Corvette?
Yeah, this is the exact same system on my car.
What kind of horsepower potential can I expect?
Well, it depends on how much boost do you want to run and that's the cool thing about
a turbo is you've got that option to have multiple boost stages.
How are we controlling that?
Are we using a special tuner?
We just have a boost controller and it just regulates the waste to say alright we want
5 pounds of boost or we want 7 or we want 10 or in the case of my car we want 18 and
you can flip a switch on the fly and change between boost levels.
So what kind of horsepower potential do we have, are we talking 50-500?
You know most of our systems at 5 pounds of boost are going to be somewhere in that 100-150
horsepower gain range depending on the size of the engine but as you start turning the
boost up, this system right here with these turbos is capable of, the base turbos that
come with the kit, 760 horsepower at the crank, and nice small turbos, very responsive.
Spools fast, no nitrous.
No nitrous yeah, you can put nitrous on it if you want to but yeah you've got about a
5-pound kit that's going to be stock and you've got about 150 horsepower with that.
And you can do that on a stock engine.
And on a stock engine, yeah these LS motors are awesome, they are just built for boost.
They can handle horsepower.
They can handle up to 10 pounds of boost pretty safely.
Without any modifications.
And 10 pounds of boost on one of these Corvettes, you are 750-760 horsepower which is the limit
of this turbo.
That's pretty respectable.
You know and upgrade the turbos, so the turbos on my car, we usually run a 1000 horsepower
set and I run those on a street law because they are still super responsive and super
fun to drive, but if I've got to go big, I put the 1250 horse turbos on and she's 1130
horsepower daily driver three miles per gallon, passes emissions tests.
it passes emissions tests.
It is so win-win.
All our kits are like I saw, are air filtered from air pipe to tip and we have them in a
tuner kit which is, you know, I'm going to do my own tuning and fuel system stuff or
we can have it as a complete kit which comes with flow mass injectors and our Diablo Sport
I3 tuner with the tune that's already on there.
Pre-programmed?
You just plug it in, push the button, it says STS base tune, click that, it doesn't get
any easier, it loads it on and you fire it up and you drive it on down the road.
Rick, we went over a couple of the applications earlier, but with this new joint partnership,
what all can we get through Holley and STS right now?
You know this partnership has been awesome, Holley has such amazing fabrication capabilities,
we're changing all of our kits over, everything is all full stainless now and so the manufacturing
process is a little different so we don't have all of our kits avalible yet, initially
right nowwe have the C6 Corvette which are all forms of those C6 Corvettes pretty much
and then the C5 Corvettes as well, and the 5th Gen Camaro is coming right behind with
the V8's and the V6 we have a killer V6 application, I just finished one up over 400 at the tires,
they are awesome.
That will be happening.
Yeah, and we've got our universal kits so we've got single kits which are available
right now and we've also got our twin kits and so anything that you can imagine, we've
had people do everything from airplanes to farm pumps that pump water, just anything,
we've had.
What if I don't own a Chevy?
You know that doesn't matter, I've had stuff overseas where we do turbos on cars that I've
never even heard of before, it's amazing, they just give us the information on the engine
size and what they are doing and we size the turbos for them and we send them the universal
kit, all they have to do is plumb it, so they've got to run some pipes and they have a turbo
on their car.
So yeah singles and twins there, then right behind it we've got all the Hemi stuff so
for all those late-model Hemi guys, all of the 5.7s, the 6.1s the 6.4s we got singles
and twins, we've got a great package for all the Hemi guys.
So for the Ford guys too?
Yeah, we've got Ford stuff coming after that so we're systematically getting all of our
kits out and back into the market with the Holley standard of products and branding,
it's going to be awesome.
Well, Rick, we're super excited for this new partnership with STS turbos.
You know the turbo market is so hot right now, everybody wants turbos, for the exact
reasons that you just gave me, exactly and this partnership with Holley and STS, it is
a match made in heaven and I'm excited to be a part of the Holley family.
Well thank you, Rick, and welcome to the family.