Stateside expertise

[Grey One]

I have to say I am always impressed by the expertise and resources available across the pond for the ISF.  It also makes me a bit nervous about who to entrust any upgrade work on to our cars here in the UK.  See this article posted by RR racing in the US on upgrades for exhaust manifolds to the cars and how difficult the job is:

https://frontstreet.media/2016/04/11/this-lexus-is-f-gets-a-performance-boost-from-ppe-engineering-gear-one-performance-and-rr-racing/

 

[GibletPH]

I read that last night after they posted the link on Facebook. Any decent garage or tuner should be able to fit a set of headers. In our car we have Peter leading the way, H&S are looking into getting a set of headers made up for our RHD cars so let's wait and see how that goes. 

[Peter P18]

I saw that article as well funnily enough!

I plan to print that off for H&S to look at as and when they do my header install for me.

Given a few owners in the States have actually tackled the header install themselves in their domestic garages, and successfully installed them, I don't see any reason why H&S or other reputable tuning garages shouldn't be able to do the job.

Where we suffer is the amount of time it will take for a shop to do this as a 'one-off'. If they do a few, they will get to know the process better, and therefore take less time to do the work. You will note the garage in the article suggest 6hrs to do the complete install. It will take most garages over here double, triple, or even longer to do this in my opinion.

Hopefully H&S are willing to invest some time and R&D into the IS-F as a platform for future work. Having a shop that knows how to install headers would be really useful for owners looking to gain a significant amount of extra HP. Even with tuning options slowly developing over in the States from the likes of RR-Racing, no single modification available today will generate more power than a set of exhaust headers.

Given the reputation and work H&S have done over the years on some truly unique and exotic race cars, I honestly believe Ian and his team are capable of doing this for us. The issue will be whether there will be enough return in it for them to do so.

I may well try and grab a set of LHD headers from one of the guys in the States for Ian to look at as well. Would give them a much larger target market if they could offer both RHD and LHD options like PPE currently do.

I'm also getting Ian to look at adding an X pipe for development purposes to see if that generates any extra HP, and what impact it has on the noise level. Know a few folks have been commenting on this recently, so hopefully that will be enough for H&S to take on some work getting a better product sorted out for a wider audience.

 

[Grey One]

Yes, will be great if we can get a model set here so owners that want this can get it done with confidence.

Thx again to Peter for being prepared to lead the way on this.

[Stuno1]

It was like this when I had my Mazda 3 MPS. Loads of investment and tuning in America and zilch over here. Similar issue. With so few cars why spend the money as a company it makes no sense unless they can sell across in the states like H&S hope to. 

[Neil E]

I'm trying to resist the lure of the ISF but I'm very interested in this. I fear it's always going to be quite costly to install headers in the UK as there are so few ISF owners with the desire to chase the extra power. 

PPE will ship headers now so whilst expensive, the upgrade is available and the process to fit them is very well documented so an exhaust/tuning specialist should be able to do the work without any major difficulty. Creating a 4-1 header from scratch might take an expert 2 days to complete so that would be say 16 hours @ £70 per hour for each side. So there's the development cost. The question to H and S or any other potential supplier over here, is will they eventually be able to make them to the same or better standard at a cost to attract enough customers? 

On the issue of the cross pipe, I was surprised to learn that the flow from both banks doesn't merge and then split again already. I'm no expert but both of the V8 exhausts I had made were designed to merge the flow from both banks. I'm not sure if there is any potential power loss but the articles I've read on exhaust design suggests merging them helps avoid 'drone.' I would always (okay on sensible days) sacrifice a few top end track-day horsepower for comfortable motorway cruising.

 

[Peter P18]

Hi Neil,

Fair points. I think the main focus for H&S is to develop homegrown systems including headers that can produce more power than the competition. Being an n/a car, every extra HP counts, as they are difficult to come by without bolting on a supercharger or turbo kit. If their headers could improve the flow enough to gain say 10hp over PPE or SIKKY, with dyno runs to support it, they would have a product people would buy both home and abroad.

I can probably source them a set of LHD headers from the States. If those guys decided they wanted to run the H&S exhaust with H&S headers, the supply and demand could be huge! PPE are on something like a 6 month backorder for their headers at the moment according to what I read on the US forum!

Demand is outstripping supply, especially with the likes of RR-Racing and TTFS offering ECU tunes that show good gains on cars with I/H/E installed.

The X pipe will be an interesting one to follow. At a static 5K RPM, my car was recorded as doing 95db by H&S. Well within the limit for most tracks in the UK. As soon as the growl starts up or you accelerate, the level goes up a lot (so much so I would be black flagged at most circuits I think).

H&S are going to add the X pipe to my car to trial. We will see how it compares in terms of noise, power, fuel economy etc over my previous setup.

I don't want to lose the V8 burble and growl I have now if I can help it. At the same time, if the X pipe gains me 15-20HP, and reduces the drone even more than the extra silencers that replaced my secondary cats, then I would be hard pressed to go back to the old setup.

It's all about trial and error at this point, what I am pleased about is the fact H&S are willing to partake in the R&D for these things with a view to marketing the results for other F owners worldwide to enjoy.

[Neil E]

Hi Peter

Firstly I should like to echo the comments of others and commend you on your efforts to further develop the car. It can be great fun being the first to try these things but no matter how thorough the research, there's usually some pain to go with it. 

Extra power over the Sikky or PPE headers would be a neat trick, perhaps with porting and scavenging every last horse they could improve it just enough to make a difference but without forced induction or engine mods, I wonder how much that could really be? I see development of the supercharger is underway but that's not going to be cheap. 

I wasn't aware of a backlog at PPE, I imported a header and some bits for the SC430 in Feb and they arrived in about 3 weeks.

The result of the cross pipe will be interesting but I don't think either the burble or the growl will be lost by crossing the flow from both banks.