Took the Saab over to Powerstation in Tewkesbury for the UK Saabs rolling road day.
Since I had my Aero on the rolling road a few years back and haven’t been using it much recently I wasn’t taking the car on the rollers, but went along to have a look and meet a few people.
A quick high speed blast down the M5 got me to Jn 9, and as I came off the motorway, this Saab, belonging to the event organiser, zoomed up behind me at a fair pace. It’s not the shiniest of Saabs, but has some useful modifications. Sadly it was overboosting excessively and couldn’t do a full dyno run.
Powerstation is a sizeable place, with a number of interesting cars being worked on. There is a rolling road room off one end, with a decent sized screen above the doorway so a group of people can see the computer output without needing to be in the room.
View towards the rolling road area.
Cars there included:
A fancy looking Evo FQ300 with rollcage, trackday tyres, very big brakes and some engine mods.
A nice 968 CS, don’t see many of those around, especially in such good condition.
An R32 Skyline
A Beetle prepared for a race series.
And a very tidy and modified RS2000
But back to Saabs. It was a set of mixed results. Some cars had issues with boost, clutches, or things not doing as well as they would have liked, but equally there were some very good performance figures.
Non-standard tyres on the rollers.
Ylee’s Aero had come all the way down from Scotland but wasn’t behaving properly.
It did however make 350 bhp at 4240 rpm and 451 lbft of torque at 3470 rpm. Given the full rev range I am sure there would have been some impressive numbers.
The 9000 Aero belonging to m5_saabcentre produced the highest power of the day of around 430 bhp, and the outputs showed a very well mapped engine with a boost profile both flat through the upper rev range and high (1.8 bar or thereabouts).
This Aero was particularly yellow, and produced a healthy 300 bhp.
Silver Aeros were not in short supply.
Some custom ECU tuning was being provided, which is the first time I have seen T5 Suite being used.
Maybe I should have had my car tested. Meeting such an enthusiastic bunch of Saab owners made me more inclined to keep the car, but the cost of suspension and brake mods to suit my trackday requirements is daunting.
Thanks to Jules for organising the event, and Powerstation for running it so professionally.