Mov'it brakes have arrived

The brakes were delivered on Monday afternoon to my office. Damn they're heavy! I generally cycle to work since it's only 5 minutes away from my house, so there was no chance of taking them home with me on Monday night. So I picked them up in the car last night (Tuesday) instead.

I've not unpacked them, although I did have a quick peak. Everything looks good, but will have to see if they'll fit OK, which will be tomorrow when I pop 'round to Jorrit at Auto Forza at lunch time to get them fitted. I'm hoping that it will be a direct fit with no modifications required... I'll take my camera with me, record the event and post some pictures.

I drove to Amsterdam in the Ghibli yesterday. It's running pretty good at the moment, with plenty of torque since I reset the E-Boost controller; there's certainly far more torque than there ever has been, requiring less gear changing when driving on the motorway, although I typically still drop down to 4th to overtake or to make some space between me and whoever is tail gating me (which seems to be increasingly common).

I've noticed a couple of things different on the car since I fitted the BMC air boxes. First of all, the noise. The induction noise is very noticeable. I don't mind this, but some people might. It's generally on throttle lift off that you hear it... a growly sucking noise. The spin up noise from the turbos is also more noticeable. The roller bearing 3200 GT turbos that I have seem to make more of a whistling noise than the stock Ghibli turbos?

The really interesting thing though with the change in air boxes is related to temperature. To install the the replacement air boxes, I decided to vent the carter hoses to the atmosphere instead of re-cycling this hot, oily air back into the induction system. As a result of this, the engine takes longer to warm up. It also appears to run considerably cooler according to the temperature guage on the dashboard. Where before I typically ran around 90 degrees, it now seems to hover below this mark. I'm very suprised that there's such a large effect and can only imagine that if recycling this air has such an impact on engine temperature then it must be having an impact on performance too? With such warm air no longer entering the cyclinders, there should be an increase in power?

The climate control inside the car has also been effected. Since the engine takes longer to warm up, so does the warm air entering the cockpit. In fact, there's no warm air entering the cockpit for about 10 minutes after starting up the car, so it's probably a good job that I don't drive the car in the winter, otherwise it would be damn cold driving to work in the mornings! Even when the car has been running for some time, unless the engine is working reasonably hard, the warm air entering the cockpit is generally much cooler than it was before the modification.

The other noticeable effect is the smell. When the car is stationary, particulary when coming to a standstill after the engine has been working hard, there's a very distinct smell of oil/fuel that briefly enters the car through the cockpit ventilation system. Again, I don't mind this since for me it makes the car feel more like a sports car and less like a modern convenience product, but I can imagine that some people would not be too happy about this.

I'm not sure where the heat exchanger is located to warm the air into the cockpit, so I'll have to check to figure out why there's such a big change. I'll try looking into it at the weekend and post my findings.