Went to the track and even on a 60degree day and awesome tires I COULDNT get under a 14.2.. when my car had stock sc , stock head and stock cam and less upgrades AND street tires it ran a 14.4.....I know it's my tune. Problem is only tuner I know to tune my car is adriancl. I'm NOT ******* his tuning by aaaaaaaanymeans as my car does run without any issues but it's just not putting down the power it should..my mods are:
tpr2 head , ns1 cam , 550cc injectors, sprintex sc kit on 60mm pulley and 2% crank ( 19psi ) , ported sneedspeed manifold, ported 421 catless headers , pacesetter exhaust, screaming demon coil , larger wires and step colder Brisk plugs , dt bpv , larger intercooler and ic sprayer ( amazingly low iat's), 3in intake... I even put in all new oem sensors such as both map sensors , front 02 sensor aaaaaaaand crank..I've made sure there's no vacuum leaks and all my vacuum lines are routed correctly and they are. All my sensors are running correctly too. I'm stumped. OOOOR could the head , cam and sprintex and intake items just be **** and are not better or more efficient than stock ? Though I find that very hard to belive but if its not my tune that only leaves hardware and those were the things I added so those would be the things THAT ARE A COMPLETE WASTE OF MONEY AND HAVE FALSE advertised gains. Again I find that hard to take in.
IS THERE ANYONE THAT WILL CUSTOM TUNE MY MINI FOR ME , I live in se Wisconsin AND I DONT MIND DRIVING 10HOURS ONEWAY to get the tuning done if so. Or can anyone point me in the direction I need... unfortunately with where my cars at its going to be hard to dial in and I feel it may need on spot tuning. Plz help because I'm seriously disappointed in my car to the point of possibility selling it..

 

I would be more suspicious of your stock time than your modified time. 14.4 from a basically stock 163hp R53 is pretty unbelievable.

 

Looking back at some auto magazine test of first generation MINI’s quarter mile times and none of them was as quick as your cars time. In a quick search I found a 2004 JCW (200 hp) that did a 14.7 but stock MCS cars seemed to be 15 plus. If’n that is the case then your modified time looks to be good and like you say a bit of tweaking with the tune you should improve.

 

It's also a FWD car. You could try putting very stiff springs and dampers in the back to reduce squat which will allow for more grip on the front wheels. Maintaining as much grip on the drive wheels will improve your times. But like the Miata, the R53 isn't about straight line speed; it's about the corners.

 

I agree that the R53 is suited best as a cornering machine.

Dragging has never appealed to me personally,
but I do understand why people like it.



If you look at the development of the famous 1320 dragster, Old Red, back in the earlier days of development it did a best run of 13.3 with nitrous and stripped down to a weight of 2468lbs.

https://www.1320.co.uk/20-our-minis

Doggedly determined tho, they kept on tweaking it in a massive manner:

You Tube

 

Did you notice how deflated the front tires were? DAAAAAMN!

I totally forgot out that one! I wonder what happened to the "factory" one that was running about in the early days, the one that was rumored to have a full carbon fiber body and weighed in at just about 2000 pounds?

I remember back in 2004/2005 when the local dealership had a tech day to teach new owners regular routine maintenance they had a "Challenge car" of some sort. It had a front mounted IC with carbon fiber IC horns and tubing. I was told that it was crushed and all the fancy one-off parts went back to BMW/MINI, to never see the light of day again. I wasn't allowed to photograph it and they promptly shut the bonnet when my camera came out; though I am sure that there are photographs somewhere; I just don't have them.

 

no , had full bolt ons so not stock, just stock head n cam and sc...had 15% pulley , catless headers, exhaust, ignition , larger ic , intake ect but garbage garbage hard over inflated tires.... so with all I added knocking off. 2 is totally unacceptable. I seen another post about suspension, I have full suspension build and I run it pretty darn stiff I have 0 body sway or anything and I was running toyo r88r 225/50r15 tires on 20psi only...
I didn't mention also that I didn't run the full track as I thought it ended were the blacktop ended but it ended at the laser light but that still would have only been good for another point too possibly a point 3 so I still wouldn't have broken the 13 barrier and my goal with it was low low 13s..lol I'm far off.. but I'm talking with adriancl and he's going to do some inpa logs and some tune adjustments and see if It can help.. but unfortunately I won't be able to get any real 1/4 data again until spring as track closed early this season to lay a complete new track. YEAAAAAAA

 

yes I totally agree but thibumy favorite racing and all I've ever done , I was wanting to get it to lay down good 1/4mile times and then I will begin auto crossing it... I got full suspension build already so the cars ready almost. Just needs some tweaking and better driver. Lol

 

So, the one factor not mentioned... weather. Were the weather conditions the exact same both time at the track? Was it colder on the first day? Lower air pressure the second day? Weather can have a dramatic effect on vehicle performance...

 

Whats your trap speed? Did you see an improvement there? I always go by trap speed as launch can have a huge affect on 1/4 time. You could also do a 60-130 time and see how it compares to other mini's? Or go to a dyno and see how much whp you're putting down.

 

So ... with your initial mods you MIGHT be running 195hp, and that would be with a tune. So ... you have a 1.6L, 195hp, 4-cylinder running 14.4 ETs. For comparison, a 1969 Pontiac GTO, 400ci, 370hp with RamAir runs only 8/10 of a second quicker. Given that you're running a paltry 97 cubic inches, I'm afraid your expectations may be out of line with reality.

 

gto also weighs 5x as much lol.. sorry but the times are not good afterwards.. I did have a tune and stuff befor also and 380cc injectors...so the 14.4 was imo about where it should have been on the crap tires and probably a flat 14 had I been able to get traction, I would spin going into 2nd even on those tires. They were bad. It was also high 90s high humidity when I went the 1st time and this 2nd time was in low 60s and very low humidity. So I had all I needed to lay down the times it just didn't happen.

 

I can't find my old slip but if i remember correctly my old trap speed was like 91 or something and now it was 98 on the 14.2

 

weather was far more favorable the 2nd time too..
1st time was in high 90s and high humidity and cloudy
2nd time was low 60s low humidity and sunny
My iats were never above 100 degrees starting on any run and lol with my "cheap worse than stock " ebay intercooler, Cai and ic sprayer my iats would be colder AFTER my run than befor,talk about efficiency...lolol

 

If that's the case, you do have a pretty big improvement. I always found that for every 10hp increase, it equals to an increase in trap by 1 mph. These cars aren't great off the line, and then aren't very aerodynamic up top, but I do recall the trap speeds of stock R53's being around 89-92mph, and then JCW's around 95-96mph, So you're probably in the 225-245whp range if you're getting 98-99mph in the trap. If you want to do more testing, you can buy a Dragy, and do some 60-130mph tests and see how you stand in the world of R53's.

 

I think I found a start of my loss of power, do these plugs look OK Granted that I've only run these plugs for maybe a 1000 miles and when I was at the track I did run some high octane gas so could that account for the brownish but yet the tops of the spark plugs have these little terminal things and they were all loose but coloration looks Normal....

 

What brand of plugs are they? Were you told to go one step colder with the sprintex kit? I just looked up Brisk - have never heard of them - and I'd probably go back to an OEM style plug and see if that helps. I tend to stay away from the 'aftermarket' plugs as friends have had bad luck with non- oem brand plugs melting and just not working as well as the OEM style plugs.

And FYI, I do agree that for all the work you did, a 98 mph trap is not very good. I'd have thought with your setup you'd be around 105-108mph trap

 

At the risk of asking a silly question, have you checked any of your investment on a dyno?

Kind regards,

Charlie

 

unfortunately no , the dyno by me shutdown and don't know of one anywhere close so 1/4 mile was best I could do to compare befor and after..

 

these are a very reputable brand plug.. Brisk silver sparkplugs and its the 1step colder plug...I cleaned them and all ignition contact points , no help..

 

I wonder if stepping down from a 550cc injector to a 440cc injector might help , maybe my injectors are abit too big and aren't scaling as accurately as possible...

 

I think the sprintex and the sneed intake manifold are crap, but hopefully tuning will get you some gains.

 

what on earth plugs are those? you need a data logger do you have filipi frango's data logger?

what afr did adrian tune you for? any data logs?

 

I'm trying to talk with him but he's seemed to have gone awol in middle of talking with him.. I think he took offense when I asked if he for sure accounted for my mods and correct injector sizing and I NEVER heard back when time came to set a time n date to attempt so retuning. So idk , I think I need to start looking into better tuning options. No offense to adriancl but on such a extensive build as mine I'm sure just plugging generic numbers into a tune isnt going to cut it with my car..I need custom tuning , on the fly tuning with data logging ect...yes,I have inpa too but being tuning noob it's not much help as most numbers I don't understand

 

I unfortunately i am going to have to agree . Also the trp2 head JUUUUUUUUNK . Those were my main things I changed. I went to a sprintex sc on 60mm pulley and 2% crank , sneedspeed manifold and 0bx 421 headers.. after I installed all those parts I only picked up .2 off the 1/4mile and gained 5mph...lololol
Sprintex :WASTE OF MONEY
thumper: tpr2 head WASTE OF MONEY
obx 421 headers: WASTE OF MONEY
And they're staying on. O well , no way I'd feel comfortable selling these parts to people and have them then waste their money and time with them also... I guess now I did my test and I failed. Lol. O well is what it is and I've had fun building it atleast.. atleast now I can steer other members away from wasting their money on the same parts I did.
I have a feeling I could make my green mini outperform this Grey mini for 1/10th the cost and parts...sucks, aftermarket really took advantage of this awesome platform and released a bunch of JUNK just to make money on and have people just lengthen their mod list , with no gains