48 replies to this topic

[Woody]

a quick search highlights about 191 curlywurlies of torque yet about 80bhp, if it was a 0-60 sprint and the van was warmed over.

woody - what was the van like up to 100mph
[/quote]
The engine was not a TD but a n/a with a turbo ,it would pull about 120mph (on a private road of corse) 0 to 30 was a bit slow but once i was rolling it was quite quick
at the same time i did my conversion my mate fitted a 1800c twin cam from a XR31 into his van but was no quicker than mine

[Woody]

My mate had a smart turbo chipped and inter-cooled and it could not pull away from my escort van (fitted with a turbo and intercooler from a mondeo and an injector pump from a P100 TD but otherwise standard) so not very fast even in a super lightweight smart car

hardly the same if its a diesel pulling over 200lb/ft of torque. if it couldn't pull away then i'd say it did quite well seeing as the smart isn't a) turbodiesel but is b) down on capacity and c) lighter

The fact that the smart was well lighter should have made the acceleration much better , it goes on power to weight that is why my elise (112bhp) is quicker 0 to 60 than a 400bhp impreza and why a motorbike with 750cc and 100bhp will leave for dead most super cars

[maph2]

its the gear selection that slows the car down, by approx a couple of seconds (factory 0-60= 10.9sec). they weigh about 850kg which is quite heavy for the size of car (heavier than a mk golf gti).

[chairchild]

isn't there a way to manually overide the gear selection process? It seems that the tuners have simply tried to work with the hardware which is already there - but what about if you simplified it, and just had a row of switches to control which gear you wanted, and you made your own gear selector mechanism, which utilised the basics of the smart cars version

[Jammy]

I would of thought if there is a way to increase the gear selection process, Mercedes/Smart would have done it? I can't see them sticking with a crappy, slow gear selection if they had a choice! I have my suspicions that if you try and make it too quick you'll have issues with missing gears or reliability problems.

[CharlieBrown]

I thought the plan was to use a manual gearchange with the smart engine so that the gear change would be quicker?

[Jammy]

If its a true sequential gearbox, I don't believe its possible to convert this to a manual gearbox in the conventional way.

[minivanman]

Friend of mine has a brabus roadster, and his wife has a normal smart - apparently the gearchange on the brabus is totally different, works really well.

[R1minimagic]

There is an upgrade you can buy for the gearchange which speeds it up by about 5 seconds, just search on smartsrus or similar website.

[mighty_mini]

5 seconds faster? sheet. how bad is it, i was just assuming it would be a little slow but it now sounds like an age!

[maph2]

5 seconds faster? sheet. how bad is it, i was just assuming it would be a little slow but it now sounds like an age!

it is - but the tuning remaps only cause a 30% improvement in shifting time. better but no much tho! not sure where this 5 secs comes from.

[Tazzy]

Nice to read or browse through since its in dutch
http://www.turbosmart.nl/

[ed4ran]

Bet one of them would fit a mini gearbox quite nicely

[Ferrina1275]

Bet one of them would fit a mini gearbox quite nicely

Don't do it!! the smart engine is so fragile and the gearbox is so bad, you'll end up spending loads of time getting the thing running properly.

I know I've owned three smarts and the only good one was the roadster with a mapped 105bhp. I'm doing a smart project car with an A series conversion, so that tells you something.

Get a GSXR 1000cc engine and have some real fun!

Check out: www.boom-trikes.com and their turbo trike, that's a smart engine.

Or do a youtube search on Diablo smart 2007!!

[Jammy]

So could you not use the Roadster engine and have it mapped?