Luke

i was told the s2 motorsport motors made around 300rwhp.

Geo

The reason there are no 2.5l 8v 944 engines making a lot of power is nobody is willing to spend the money. Those Honduh engines that are making 225-250hp NA are expensive. R&D was even more expensive. Nobody in the 944 community is willing to spend the money. It's made worse becaue the community believes all the crap about Porsche designed about as good as it can get and left nothing on the table, blah blah blah. That's not true either. God, if it is, they did a terrible job, 150 bhp from 2.5l.

Keep in mind that Jon Milledge gets 183 bhp out of a IT legal engine. That's NA. Cams must be stock. Flywheel must be stock and unmodified. Main pulley must be same material as stock (thus not significatnly lighter). No porting and polishing. I'll bet you Jon could get 250 bhp from a 2.5l 8v engine. Probably would cost on the order of $30k+. Who wants to be first in line? Those Honduh guys spend pretty near that for their big hp engines. More for their big hp turbo engines.

When was the last time someone played with different valves? A major development project to create a high flowing head? Hell, where can you get a decent cam for the 8v 944 besides Milledge? I've never even heard of an adjustable cam gear for the 944. Milledge supposedly gets much better results from headers built to his spec over the common MSDS and Bursch headers.

The bottom line is nobody is doing the development. They aren't doing it because nobody is willing to spend the time and money. Heh. Nobody has even developed a good CAI for these cars. Nobody as developed a good short runner intake (should be good for a bunch of hp). Instead we get throttle response wheels that make zero hp. We get some underdrive pulleys (those are effective). We do get low mass flywheels. There aren't any particularly good chips available for the NA either.

Fishey

my point is there doing more Hp with much less. Does anyone else see it going on?

Geo

Less what?

Certainly not money.

Speed is money. How fast do you want to go?

dave120

I don't know as much about Nissan engines as you do obviously, but I don't think the 2.0L Nissan motor has as much torque at any given rpm as an S2 does. Most of the time you see cars like that with 4.10 gearing so they seem like they've got more than they do. Gears so short it's pretty annoying...my Contour (though a Ford) was like that.

Either way all those econoboxes usually have like 50% less torque than horsepower, which is why their powerbands are so peaky compared to something like a v8. They want to make more power out of a smaller engine. The only real way to do that (aside from slight improvements with timing, ignitions, etc maybe) is to make the things rev that high and use things like V-TEC or some similar thing. Once they start moving a comparable amount of air to a large engine at like 7000 rpms they start making a little. They can be quick cars, but very few are actually FAST cars. Even if they manage to get a little power out of it, the gearing still kills them in the 3-4-5 gears. Unless they change those too...but thats $$$. I would't spend that much on one. Might as well buy a sports car to begin with if you want to spend that kinda money rather than try and turn a grocery getter into something it's not.

Geo

Well, I don't know the tq spec for the S2, but the SR20DE puts out 132 ft/lbs stock. I'll bet that's more tq/liter than your S2.

You should learn more about other cars. Again, the SR20DE puts out 140 hp stock and 132 ft/lbs. OK, it's one example, but you're making statements that are way too broad.

The Sentra SE-R is a dead match for the 8v NA 944 - even on a road course.

Or, do more homework and choose wisely.

dave120

Actually, 132 torque over 2L is 66 per L, while 215 over 3L is 71 torque/L, so the S2 has more, sorry. 140 hp/2L is 70, and 211 hp/3L is 71, so it doesn't even have more HP/L than the S2 does either.

And you're right, that was ONE example you gave. Every Civic, Accord, Eclipse, or most others are like 160 hp (the V-TEC ones) and 90 lb/ft.

The only reason the one you mentioned has more is probably because it's a 2L. Displacement=torque naturally. You brag about Sentra SE-Rs here all the time, but I would never drive anything front wheel drive on the track, but that's just me. Nothing is FWD and called a sports car in my book. Whether it's as fast or not, it's not as much fun.

Geo

Pretty damned close.

Most of the Honduhs are torqueless wonders, but I'll bet (I don't have the specs) the NA Eclipse has similar numbers to the SE-R. The point is, there are other cars with 4 cylinder engines that do have some decent torque.

Well.... It sure was a lot of fun running down a 911 in my last race and passing him under braking.

Well, this has certainly gone off-topic and into a pissing contest.

Back to the topic at hand, the reason there aren't any high output 8v 2.5l 944 engines is nobody is spending money on them and seriously trying to develop them. That and the factory never really did the sort of development work on the engine like they did with the 911.

BeerBurner

Not that I'm really an expert here, but I'm going to have to echo the "cost" reasons, too. In this area, the price differential between my 944 and a similar 951 is about $4-5k. When all is said and done, I'd be better off spending the money upgrading to the 951, where I'll not only have the power, but I'll have better suspension and brakes, too. In the end, it just seems like a better way to spend the money.

BB.

dave120

Well I'm not going to get into a pissing match about it because I'm not trying to shoot down any other cars, but my point was that it's not very common to see big torque #'s from small displacement engines unless they use something like a turbo to generate it. Yes Nissan made similar #'s in hp/torque per L as Porsche's 3.0 with that 2.0L engine you were talking about. But proportionately it's got quite a bit less power. Porsche used the bigger engine because, well, their cars needed more power to do what they were designed to do. You always get much nicer torque curves with bigger engines for the most part. But face it, those small econobox engines are built to get gas mileage. That's why they use such small engines. It's not because they can get as good of performance out of them. Look at the Japanese real performance oriented cars and they use bigger ones along the lines of the 3000GT, Skyline, Supra..I don't see any 2.0's in those cars.

Compare Porsche's 2.5L with something like Ford's 2.3L of the same era and look at power output. When the 944 S2 came out in 1989 it was the most powerful production 4 cylinder (NA) in the world. (Back on topic)

But just for that moon face I'll shoot you back with this :
http://slate.msn.com/id/2081194/

Geo

Me neither.

Well, of course there is no replacement for displacement. But, don't forget that there are a lot of 2 liter based race series all over the world. The Nissan SR20DE engine I was talking about was the engine used in the BTCC winning Primera (our G20). It was also the basis for Nissan's WRC homolugation special. The engine in the eclipse is the basis for much of Mitsu's 2 liter racing. My point is don't lump all small bore cars in with the Honduhs as torqueless wonders. They aren't all torqueless. Yes, smaller displacement will certain yield less torque, but some product very good torque for their size. Shoot the SR20DE at 2l puts out almost as much as the 8v 2.5l 944 engine.

Hey, I'm not trying to **** on anyone here. Up until about 5 years ago, the 944 was the performance benchmark for reasonably affordable cars in my mind. That's a pretty enviable position to hold for 15 years. It's a great car and I'm thrilled to own one finally.

Hehe. The moon was meant in fun.

I didn't read that whole article, just quickly scanned it. Much has been written on the topic of FWD vs RWD. I've recently gone from all FWD to all RWD. For a race car, the only FWD I was considering was the Sentra SE-R, mainly because I have a lot of experience with it. But, for my personal car, I prefered RWD, mainly, well, "just because."

roadrunner

If anyone wants to compare 3 liter engines, didn't Honda's 3.0 L V-6 in the NSX make 270 Hp, 227 lb-ft?

M758

I have had a very nice time Racing with Sentra SE-R's at Willow Springs.
The 944-spec car and the SE-R raced in the SE-R Cup are quite similar in lap times. I'd give the edge to the SE-R in power, but handling goes to the 944-spec. This experinece is from about 80 minuntes of wheel to wheel with these guys at Willow Springs in the May NASA race.

Now I think the 944-spec cars can go a little quicker that we did then, but not sure how much faster the SE-R Cups can get.

Back on Topic.
I believe George is right on target. Very few have attempted to build a proper 944 non-turbo race motor. One of the reasons there are 400-500 hp 944 Turbos is that people wanted to race them and the technology was developed. With respect to the NA cars there has not been the series and rule set out there to start pushing the limits of NA hp. Jon Milledge is one guy and John Anderson is another. Anderson is using displacement and Milledge is using stock type displacments.

Classes like SCCA ITS are not true technology builder classes. While there is some power to be had with in the rules there is compartivly little that can be done.

Remember also that most motors today are 16v motors. The 2.5L 8v car made only 150 hp while the 2.5L 16v motor make 188. Compare the 944S motor to most 2.0 to 2.5l motors today and you will have better comparison since they both use 16v technology. Again look at the impact of variocam on S2 vs 968. 208 hp vs 236 hp. So using an over simplified assumption (same percet gain) a 2.5L 16v Variocam motor has the potential for 212hp. Hmm starting to look much better right. (84.8 hp/L)

So now compare the 2.5L 16v variocam "motor" to a Nissan 2.5L 16v variable timing motor.

Blue S2

Whoa, our cars are almost 2 decades old!!! They are still pretty competitive with todays cars! Back then what little 4 cyclinder could touch these cars? You cant compete with this many years advancement in automotive and computer technology. You want a powerful N/A today, GT3. Im sure in 20 years people will complain they cant get more HP from a GT3 engine. Porsche made it for race...i doubt they settled for very restrictive parts or dumbed it down for grocery hauling at a slow pace. Its old, deal with it! Turbo-charge, Supercharge, rebuild from the ground up. Your choice, just a lot of money. Obviously bolt on replacements have not been any better than factory. (except SFR...) Porsche did it right for the day. They had it. Times change. What do you expect.

Geo

Hehe. Getting off-topic again, but they are pretty close. The QR25DE in the current Sentra SE-R Spec V I believe makes 185 bhp. Both are 2.5l 4 cylinder engines with balance shafts and twin cams.

I'd say that's a dead heat. Kudos for the 944 engine for producing that power over 10 years ago. Kudos to the Nissan for making it while being tremendously more environmentally friendly.