Turbosmart Touring: The house of boost
The NSTParts team gets the royal Turbosmart tour..
The NSTParts team gets the royal Turbosmart tour, so we can understand what goes into making some of the best boost control products on the planet
There’s no denying that Turbosmart are on the forefront of product development
With stiff competition in the GT-R tuning scene, World Time Attack Challenge based in Sydney being the centre of time attack racing for the world, and gargantuan drag events such as Jamboree being the pinnacle for import racing, companies like Turbosmart are leading the way in terms of development and quality. With countless Sema awards for innovation and quality, we thought it best to dive straight in and check out the Turbosmart headquarters for ourselves. Thanks to a few friendly connections, the team opened their doors to the NSTParts team and took us through the Turbosmart secret lair.
A house of research, development and top class production
Based in Western Sydney, the Turbosmart HQ isn’t a storefront. With the focus on research, development, product, distribution and all-round bad-assery — the Turbosmart head office looks like any other commercial warehouse in the area. It’s when you get inside though, that you realise just how large their production setup is, and how vast their range. Knowing we would want to check out the production in full detail, Stewart Mahony, the General Manager of Turbosmart and Brendan Lee the Asia Pacific Sales Manager took us through each of the stages. In what would generally be the inwards goods area, Turbosmart store their raw material. Seeing as most of their components are CNC-machined alloy, long alloy raw lengths are stacked high, perched next to containers of already machined and marked wastegate tops, bodies, and collars ready for either anodizing or assembly.
As we left the raw material area, Stewart walked us through the tooling station, where precision tools and machine-bits are kept to run, fix, and maintain the all-important CNC machinery in operation at Turbosmart. With an incredibly large surface area, the Turbosmart facility is covered in solar panels that contribute up to 90-percent of the energy consumption in the building, which makes running CNC machinery twenty-four-seven a much cheaper exercise, which ultimately reflects in the end-user buy price (and keeps the greens happy!). Turbosmart’s CNC operation is colossal, with the business using CNC machinery to ultimately produce most of their components for the products. With CNC operators on-site, the machines are generally left to their own devices, with the operators there generally to program the machines, load them with RAW material, clean them of swarf or waste product. It’s impressive just how many pieces the team turns out in a day, and the tool cupboard is an engineers dream.
Testing until desctruction
One of the most impressive aspects of the all in-house Turbosmart facility, is the testing bench, where sacrificial components are put through the strictest of testing, or ‘destruction testing’ as the team at Turbosmart like to call it. We’ve seen their latest water-cooled GenV be subject to 1200-degrees of heat, with a team-members finger placed gingerly on the top-hat, proving the water-cooling capabilities of the new range. Brendan explained that the latest Motorsport GenV ‘gate has been virtually indestructible, thanks to a longer valve and a diaphragm that is much further away from the wastegate bell. In this configuration, after 24-hours of the test bench, it wouldn’t fail — how many boost-control companies can make such a claim?
Turbosmart's best kept secret
Not many of you will know, but Turbosmart in fact have their very own circuit test mule. Unfortunately, the Mazda RX-7 FC hasn’t been campaigned in some time, but still features and tests the latest components on offer. Powered by a PAC Performance 13B engine with a GTX4088R turbo, it’s no slouch, but hasn’t been used since it’s last World Time Attack Challenge onslaught. With rotary engines generally producing the most amount of heat in circuit racing applications, we thought it the best test vehicle and most certainly relatable to the pulsing New Zealand car scene.
A great tour and a lot to take away
After an in-depth demonstration on how to put Turbosmart wastegates and blow-off valves together from the beginning, the Turbosmart tour was over. We got our obligatory photo with the world’s largest wastegate and blow off valve, and thanked the team for a good time, with our new-found knowledge and insight on all things boost-control — we now know what it takes to have a reliable boost setup, with quality being at the forefront. If you want to know more about boost control, we’ve got plenty of tech articles in previous issues, or head to the Turbosmart Youtube channel to learn all things Turbosmart and boost-control related.