We arrive in Phoenix between 4am and 5am on Friday morning. I don't really remember....Dave and Billy are rock stars when it comes to driving through the night. We squeeze our 48' trailer into the very back of our hotel parking lot and check in. The dyno competition begins in a few hours, so the lack of sleep really isn't going to effect our chances in this little shin dig just yet. We hike up to our rooms and pass out for a few hours. The morning brings an overcast sky, and it looks like its threatening to rain. Not at all what I expected...I should have packed more than shorts and t-shirts!
A few days before we left town we were discussing the dyno portion of this competition. The R35 GT-R apparently doesn't like Dyno Pack's due to the way they load the drivetrain. We received a heads up reading an Edmunds.com article (http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do...ticleId=125172) when they saw their test car get mad on a Dyno Pack. Not wanting to take the chance we contacted the event organizers and they came up with a plan for our car. We would run our MazdaSpeed3 on the same Dyno Pack as everyone else, then head over to a local Mustang Dyno and run the MazdaSpeed3 again. This would give us a way to calculate the percentage between the two dyno's. We would then run our GT-R on the Mustang Dyno and submit the results.
Running between two shops was going to take some time, so we decided to head to UMS Tuning early to see about jumping on their Dyno Pack right away! The cool weather would play to the advantage for todays portion of the competition. It was cool out, not 100+ like I expected. Upon arrival the UMS crew welcomed us like old friends. Since the GT-R was behind the MazdaSpeed3 in the trailer, we unloaded both cars for the time being.
The UMS crew went right to work on our little MazdaSpeed3. I am used to being around our Mustang Dyno so this Dyno pack was a little foreign to me. It was a pretty cool little machine....oh so quiet. When you run a car on a Mustang Dyno the majority of the noise is coming from the tires. So it can get pretty loud at times. UMS had run a local MazdaSpeed3 a while before, so they were interested to see how ours was going to compare.
We pulled 276hp and 320tq and before we knew it, it was time to load up the trailer and head over to the other dyno! Before we left, Chris Rado arrived on the scene. Chris is a pretty cool guy, really laid back, down to earth, and had a rad dog with him.
Last edited by Justin; 05-29-2008 at 08:48 AM.
"For once and forever, the power of everything else in the world would be relative to the '85 Yamaha VMax and a fudged imaginary number." - Jeff Hartman
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