Turbosmart E-Boost 2 fitted to Maserati Ghibli

A while back I fitted Turbosmart's E-Boost 2 to my Ghibli and have mentioned it a few times in previous posts. At the weekend, after fitting the BMC DIA airboxes, I remembered to take a couple of photographs which I thought I'd post.

The E-Boost kit comes in two parts, the gauge (which houses all the electronics) and a solenoid, which is the three way valve that physically controls the engine's boost pressure. I intended to locate the guage in the foot well on the passenger side along with the car's engine management system. I assumed that once the system was set up then I wouldn't need to see the guage, but just trust that it's working. This may ultimately be what I do, but in the meantime I just have it located in the glove compartment where it is easily accessible and where I can see it if need be. The guage reads the inlet pressure by T-ing into the hose that feeds air to the pressure guage on the dashboard. I T-eed into this line behind the steering column using the plastic T and silicone hose that came with the kit, and fed the hose round the back of the center console to the glove compartment.

Power for the guage comes from T-ing into the power supply for the radio in the center console, running cable again to the glove compartment and wiring into the loom provided with the kit via the supplied fuse.


A pair of wires was then run from the guage, through the firewall (via an existing wire port) to the solenoid. I located the solenoid in place of the OEM solenoid, which is just behind the plenum chamber on my MY92 Ghibli. The documentation that comes with the kit recommends leaving the existing solenoid in place, since on modern cars there's a feedback signal from the solenoid that enables the car's ECU to determine if the solenoid is working. However, on my Ghibli, it seems that the OEM solenoid is not that sophisticated, since the car runs fine with the OEM solenoid removed.

The solenoid uses the existing wastegate and inlet pressure control hoses and vent hose, so connecting to these is as simple as removing the hoses from the OEM solenoid and connecting them to the appropriate ports of the Turbosmart solenoid valve.

And that's about it for the physical installation. Pretty simple really... but then the electronic control needs seeting up which takes a bit more effort and to be done safely really needs to be carried out on a rolling road. The set up procedure is well documented in the manual so I won't go through it here... but it's quite simple to understand and follow and carrying it out on a rolling road is really easy, since the boost pressure can be set on the fly in real time reading real inlet pressure which is nice. Setting up the controller gain (sensitivity) is a bit more tricky and unless you're comfortable doing this yourself I'd advise getting some help from someone who knows what they're doing.

Before playing with any of the settings, it's very important to set the cut out pressure to prevent overstressing the engine! I think mine's set to about 1.3 or 1.4 bar... if the inlet pressure hits this then the solenoid opens up and quickly bleeds off this pressure, keeping everything safe.

I've got my guage to beep at me when the pressure exceeds 1.2 bar which is quite useful for reminding you to change gear. Can get a bit annoying though... last year I was driving back from Germany rather quickly, so the thing was beeping away continously at me. But for general driving you'll hardly ever hear it. But it is amusing seeing peoples bemused faces in the passenger seat... "what's that beeping?".

You can set the guage up to read the engine's RPM by tapping into one of the distributor wires, but I've not done this.

I got this controller because I was having trouble controlling the inlet pressure with the OEM solenoid and couldn't track down the cause. I had a brand new OEM unit but was only getting fail safe boost of 0.7 bar. I couldn't track down the cause, and ultimately put it down to something strange going on with the ECU. Otherwise, I would have been happy continuing to use the OEM unit, with Rica Chiptuning fiddling with the pressure map on the ECU. However, I'm very happy with the E-Boost since it's easy to use and enables me to fiddle with things without having to rely on a chiptuner. It also enables future projects such as Aquamisting...