A Turbo In the rear of the Car?

[67 caprice]

Has anyone seen this before? How much Turbo Lag would you get? http://www.jlturbo.com/

[Little Bob]

I've read about this before. I think I saw it in an old magazine from the 70's. I would have to do the math. But I think you would get more turbo lag with bigger turbo's. I would think if you want those kind of gains you could spend your money a more wisley.

[derekf]

I remember reading a discussion on that kit at one point. I don't remember if it was on the old site or somewhere else.

If memory serves, the net result was that you lost too much heat energy going all the way back there so you lose efficiency.. the search on the old board is bad enough that I'm not surprised I can't find it though. Hopefully some others will chime in.

[Fuelie Fan]

As a friend once said: You can do a lot dumb things with turbos and still make power. This would would meet that criteria.

We talked about this system before on the old board, and the general consensus was that this setup is FAR from ideal. The distances makes this system woefully inefficient, and would probably have poor response time (though I have not driven one, so I cannot offer any personal review). On a v8 with gobs of torque, I guess it's not that critical to have instant-on boost, since all you'd do is smoke the tires. This is me trying my hardest not to pre-judge....I wouldn't buy it.

[96Z28SS]

IF you do a search on www.ls1tech.com for STS turbo system, you'll find that there a bunch of guys running this turbo system and many getting close to 500rwhp, and a couple trying to push it over 650rwhp.
The system works, I personally wouldn't do it to a 1st or 2nd gen camaro, cause there is plenty of room under the hood, but the 4th gen guys don't have much room and this kit makes installation easy.

[BigBlockOlds]

PHR has a write up in the November 2004 issue on the STS rear turbo. Definitely interesting reading.

Seems like one of the nice things about this setup is that you don't need custom headers or manifolds to make it work since the turbo is downstream of everything.

[next69]

I guess it depends on your project, the kit cost $3600 if you are building a first gen. from the ground up I think you could take the additional $3600 and invest it into the motor and obtain those HP numbers. For bolt on performance on a later model where under hood packaging is a issue it is OK. My overall opinion is our types of cars are supposed to be clean and free of clutter thats just my opinion.

[TurboLark]

Only thing I have a problem with is this :
In order to have the quick spool up and cut the lag down dramatically, they must be using a smaller a/r turbine housing than would normally be used. This seems to be showing up as a lack of rpm ability. Look at the dyno graphs in the magazine, the power drops off pretty good at around 5500rpm. This kinda shows me that at the higher rpms the backpressure at the turbine is limiting the power/rpm ability. Now, this setup is great for the truck apps they have, since you can produce a great amount of low rpm torque, but for a Camaro, you'd think you would want to turn the rpm a bit more. i'm gonna try it out on my 86 Suburban since i have some parts to play with in the shed.