Those dyno graphs appear to have a fairly reasonable torque curve to my eye, obviously not much of a streetable motor but with the correct gearing you could keep that consistently in its powerband around any circuit I can think of..
Having said that I'm not familiar with the gearboxes these cars use.
The car has a 3.7 final, so its very long, but u are right its not streetable as its very aggressive. On road tyres that car burns through gears 1 to 4.
1. You mentioned the e-manage was the preffered choice of ecu there. How does this go with controlling ignition. I was reading one of the jamaican sites that said they were having trouble with the std ecu taking over and dropping timing due to low ron fuel. Is this the case?
Yes the E-manage has proved to be a great partner for the Starlet. I've had no problem with the E-manage taking control of the ignition timing. It apparently has circuitry that kills the signal, however in the 4AGE application where this signal is needed for the ECU, it will either give an error, or keep reverting back to stock unless you use that little circuit box Greddy says you need. So no issues on EP timing.
2. What sort of ign advance are you running on these engines? Due to the weaker std internals and rings, I imagine the slightest detonation could destroy an engine pretty fast, do you tend to retard the ign a little to give allowances for variances in fuel ron, (it tends to vary from pump to pump here) or do you just go balls deep and tune on the edge?
We tend not to play around with the ignition due to our fuel quality. We first tune the fuel curve and use the ignition timing for response or to smooth out areas of the curve if it can be done.
3. Are you still using the std ringlands. With most std engines that are pushed over here, the rings seem to be the first thing to go around 240hp. Then again this could just be detonation.
Everything is as stock, and as I said earlier we don't plan on detonating as we wouldn't put the engine in such a situation.
4. What sort of headbolts do you use? On std bolts Mine lifted the head, spraying a thin mist of coolant and then re-sealed after a full power run at 300hp. now running close to 330whp but just blew a gasket.
We are using standard headbolts. The cheap way is to use 4AGE ones by tapping the head, but since ARP makes 4efte headbolts, if push comes to shove thats what we will go with. The other option is o-ringing.