So- this manifold. This manifold is a sordid tale of me being in the right place at the right time, and making pretty much any DISI owner in the country a whole bunch of jealous. The story starts with our intrepid ms3 owner being at a local speed shop, because parts needed to be retrieved. I was picking up an SRI from a friend of mine and a boost gauge and a new not leaky plastic POS BPV from my good friends @ MAPerformance. Chris- the owner of the shop, starts asking the panel of ms3 owners there (I think there were 4-5 of us) if anyone had a car available for some prototype work.... a test pipe had been mentioned. Everyone else is like "you can have it for a week, two weeks" etc. I had the trump card as I was already in the wifes' car for the winter, as my ms3 didn't get driven in snow for the 1st 3 years of ownership. It being early Feb, the car had been mothballed since November. My reply was a simple "Well, snow melts in like....April. I need it back by April" Of course, this made Chris very happy, and everyone else very angry. Chris then says that he has someone for me to talk to. This is where we meet Bob. Bob is MAP's port guru. Seriously this guy is the mad scientist... built himself a TT SRT-4 using factory manis, because he could. Bob tells me that he wants to pull apart the entire intake side of the car, just to see what he can do with it. This obviously, is not a bad idea to yours truly. My final cost? 0.00. This is an agreeable number, for obvious reasons. So me, being fat dumb and happy, agreed to drop the car off, and it was gone a week later. Fast forward a few months, and I get a call from Bob saying that we have some interesting numbers. They had pulled the VCTS out of the #1 runner, and picked up 5whp. Now this, this is not bad. However, there was more. Flow benching the manifold revealed that the runners were horribly uneven, with a total of a 25% variance or so between the 4 runners, the #1 runner being the worst offender with the VCTS and all of that. So, some port work ensues. The mani is pulled, runner matched, honed, the whole freakin works. It is then welded back together (They had to cut it open to do the whole thing) and then jet coated, and I got a nice little MAP plate welded to the front. I thought it was cool. The final numbers were that the mani itself had picked up 100cfm from the port work, with variances down to like.......2%? 5% something like that. As stated in another thread, I have the flow numbers somewhere. In the mean time I also was graced with a free test pipe (cat elim, whatever you wanna call it). I got the car back late April, with some interesting results. The car actually dynoed 20-30whp gain, from the test pipe, the SRI, and the mani. What wasn't sure at the time, was what it was doing boost wise, as the boost logging software on said dyno was fubar at the time. Anyhow, so we bench tested it, and called it good. Another month goes by, and I get a call from Chris. They want to see if we can dyno my car one last time, as the boost loggings been fixed. I trundle over there one night after work, pop the hood and let her cool down.... TMIC+heatsoak=fail. Strap her down to the dyno, and confirm what I suspected. Car is only pulling 13psi. This can't be right...... so we pull again. 13 psi. WTF? One more dyno pull...... and you guessed it, 13 psi. Another friend of mines car sporting the EXACT same modifications as mine, running off the same fuel, on no tune.... pulls the same whp number as mine. 16psi. This is repeated 2 more times just to verify. Mind you, we had the stock numbers, but we wanted another analog, to be sure. Pull up my sheets and lay them over the new ones as a comparo, and sure enough, car is making MORE power, on less boost, and spooling sooner. The reason? The DISI ECU is a tricksy little bugger, and has a target it likes to hit or power. SO- it saw all the extra air, said, ok, and pulled boost.
To my knowledge there are now officially two more of these manis floating around..... and I've been banned from several sites for these OUTRAGEOUS claims. And yet, the manis, which are a strictly custom job, go for close to a grand each and they're backordered. All on word of mouth.
Half of them wouldn't run and the rest would be transplant victims that ran like scalded dogs.
