TG’s rally car: now with added power

Project rally is moving on at pace. Just before the weekend we announced the winner of the livery competition and now we can confirm that we've managed to marginally improve our horsepower.

By almost 100 per cent...

You might remember that we were looking at either boring out our Hyundai i20's 1.2, or fitting the 1.6 from a Veloster. Well, boring was a no-go as the cylinder walls wouldn't have had enough thickness left, and we were having all kinds of issues making the i20's engine management system talk to the Veloster engine without it ending in some sort of binary warfare.

Anyway, we have now sorted that by fitting the Veloster engine and a piggyback ECU that runs the ignition and injection systems for the 1.6 engine. So on Friday we tootled over to Advanced Motorsport and Engineering near Silverstone where a chap called Dan Turner attached EY63 UGT to his nifty hub dyno and fired it up.

Firstly, it sounded awesome (there's a video clip attached here, so have a listen) and secondly, it made 148bhp at the hubs, 160bhp at the flywheel. Happy days.

As you might be able to hear from the clip, the engine revs a fair bit higher here than in the Veloster as we've tweaked the engine management, allowing us something around 8,000rpm. The chaps at 586 Engineering have also fitted an awesome set of carbon intake trumpets and - as it's all a bit of a tight fit - drilled holes in the front radiator surround to get more air in. That's the sort of attention to detail you don't get in F1.

It's by no means finished yet, but the new engine is in. We have the power.

And it doesn't stop there. The new livery is being applied over the next couple of days and on Thursday the awesome Hyundai and I will be at the Wales Rally GB media day in North Wales. Keep an eye out - there'll be more stories over the next few days.