Porsche Enthusiasts Club Forum

Ok, so the turbo guys always get so much of my attention as well as the limelight on the forums, so it is about time the S2's chaps got some attention.

For years we have improved 944 S2's for customers with some great results and to my knowledge, everyone with an S2 has always been really pleased with the results, but much of the scientific approach has been directed towards the 944 turbo products and developments here at JMG.

So I have singled out a car which was earmarked to be the next to be prepared to sell out of the collection, and temporarily diverted it to my mad scientist experiments.

Over the next few weeks, I will get the car to a point where it is absolutely bone stock, serviced up to date and fault free so it can produce close to factory figures on the dyno. It is a cat equipped car, so we can also test the real benefits of cat bypass or not.

Along the way, I hope to dispel some myths about 944 S2 tuning, will see on the dyno what works and what does not, and hopefully will be in a position to provide some 944 S2 tuning products which are backed up with dyno data and have been honed to produce real results.

Nothing too radical, no 3.2 S2 engines, no serious modifications to engines, just cat bypasses, air filtration, some new chip development, ignition upgrades and possibly some investigation into cams and cylinder head modification.

Part of the plan will be to see if we can also develop chips which are honed to particular setups. As you know, an off the peg chip is a great product, but a custom remap is always better.. that is because an off the peg chip needs to be a jack of all trades, cat, no-cat, std-air-filter, replacement-panel-air-filter, cone-filter etc... With my upcoming research, I plan on making individual chips for each variation of modified S2.

I might also play around with MAF conversion, map sensor addition and will address eco-cruise tuning to make the car more economical at cruise conditions.

Anyway, lets see what can be done!

Sounds great I for one will look forward to your results as I would like to uprate my car without going nuts.

Very interested to see how this pans out.
I have a S2-SE, one of the very last S2's that came from Porsche with a different DME chip (Internal Porsche memo attached) M030 suspension including a 31mm front anti roll bar (The biggest I have seen elsewhere is 30mm) and A/C delete. I have swapped in a Janspeed exhaust system and deleted the cat so far and have been thinking about a supercharger or a set of ITB's

Really interesting car you have there? Is it by any chance Cobalt Blue? Only reason I ask is yours will be one of the last ones out of the factory and has all the toys, most of these like my one I sold last spring, and most of the ones I have seen all seem to be Cobalt Blue.

Mines a white one, funny enough the only other one I've seen was white as well.
I would be interested to see what mine produces on the dyno before I do any more mods.

Jon a supercharger conversion could give good BHP & I just know somone who has one!

I too would be extremely interested in this.

I would love to see a bhp gained per £ spent graph for each modification eventually produced or similar.

As a bog standard S2 owner, I am thinking of perhaps a decat exhaust and performance chip but it would be great to know the cost/benefit of these things beforehand.

Also with these performance chips - no manufacturer that I can find seems to be displaying actual before and after dyno figures which does make me wonder how genuine their claims are....

Anyway good luck with the project Jon and if you need to borrow a donor car then mine's available.

sounds very interested. subscribed!

Be very interested to see the results of what works and what doesn't. As there are 3 times as many S2's around as there are Turbos then it might well be a viable marketplace for a proven product

Bet you can't get past 250bhp for less than £2k though

Oh Paul, your terrible! Thats a gauntlet thrown squarely at my feet, how could I resist??!?! ..

You're probably right though, and you would probably win that bet, however I can try.

The main thing is, there has been so much work on the 944 turbo, we really know exactly what works and what does not.. I have a couple of things we have been working on for the turbo over the last years which are yet to be seen by the public, but with the S2, there are so many myths, rumours and sales talk, I would like to document the facts.

Truth be known, we make much more business in tuning 996 and 997 turbo's these days, but the 944 market has always been so good to us as a whole and has often been where my heart was, I would like to draw a line under 944 modification and be able to say to the world "Here is what works, this is how you do it and you should get XXX BHP" even if it earns us no money.

All our results will be in the public domain, there may remain a few things which we keep secret, but we will be transparent about that.

One of the things I will also be trying to do is make the cars a little more green on cruise conditions with fuel economy benefits as well as targeting power. A bit of a win-win

With each dyno run I hope to download the dyno data and convert it as an exel spreadsheet file, so we can analyse the data ourselves, but also upload some funky overlaid graphs to show the progress in an easy to digest format.

We will also document all the findings on the new website in the "articles" section for anyone to download.

Should be fun

And Mitch... We will of course be translating much of what we learn to the 968 and running the same program for the 968 engine once the 944 S2 one is complete, which may interest you in particular!

Where are the pic's of what we did to your 944 recently Mitch??? Come on, start a thread, everyone here will be really interested in the transformation your car has gone through!!

A 3.0 4v per cylinder putting out 200 odd bhp always seemed a poor effort compared to say an E30 M3, is throttle bodies the way to go for the S2 ?.

Multiple throttle bodies can be the icing on the cake, but there is so much else to do and test first.

As standard, the 944 S2 is at about 69% volumetric efficiency, there are a lot of reasons for this, but I hope to improve that somewhat. We have done it before, just have not been scientific and logged all the before and after data, and fine tuned things.

There are also some modifications which never quite seem to add up, such as the fact that if you chip and decat a cat equipped car you end up with more power than you would get from a factory non cat car with the same chip. We have ideas of why this is, but we want to take it a bit further while also clearing up this phenomenon and the myths at the same time.

Jim, just seen your message, I missed it earlier...

Yes, be quiet about that supercharger, ok?

still have a few bits to attend to :-refit custom exhaust, refresh engine bay paint , lower the car a bit more etc. etc. then ill do a full build write up. quick snap when it was @JMG