Back in the day, it was hard to really quantify the benefit of a your run-of-the-mill bolt-on modification. Sure, most mass-produced intakes and exhausts were shiny and and likely made some better noises compared to the stock components. However, local dynos were hard to come by and most people couldn’t afford fancy programmable ECU’s. So, we had to rely on manufacturer claims and the woefully divergent reviews on various web forums…most of which came down to the infamous “butt dyno.” One guy felt a huge power increase, another says the car is slower. Sigh.
Jon recently installed a newly revised Corksport Turbo Inlet Pipe on the Mazdaspeed 3. It’s design certainly looks much better than the stock piece. Thankfully, with a few simple datalogs (and some knowledge of Excel) it’s easy to see how it compares to the stock inlet. Over the course of a few logs pre-and-post installation over the same road, we can see that the Corksport inlet spools faster and holds a bit more boost from about 4500 rpm up on our setup. Target boost is 21 psi, so there is slight post-spool spike to tune-out.
While the butt dyno is happy as well, I’m glad there is some actual data to support the investment. The new inlet also fit nicely and the ricer in me loves the slightly louder spool compared to the Cobb silicone SRI alone (which has been installed for some time now).
Kwame
Z1 Performance
Jonathan
Corner Balance 