| I've been thinking about what's the "best" size of turbos to put on a street car. I know a lot of it comes down to personal preference, so I'm not going to focus in on specific types of turbos at the moment. I'm just going to focus on the general philosophy behind sizing. Most people here drive their car on the street most of the time, and they occasionally make dyno pulls and take it to the track. (Track in this case is the dragstrip, since I don't take my car onto the roadcourse. If I was big into roadcourses, I'd probably have a stripped down track car for that purpose and not use my heavy, comfortable Z.) If you get small turbos, they'll be great for driving around town but they'll fall short on the high end. They simply won't produce enough power on the top end to pull on the highway or get great times at the track. On the other hand, if you get large turbos so you can put out big numbers, your car is going to be useful on a dyno and the highway and not much else. If you race your car at the dragstrip, you're going to need nitrous to spool up the turbos to get respectable times. Otherwise, it's lag city and your trap speed will be the only thing that stands out. But since you're going to be using nitrous now to spool up the big turbos, you've added an extra element that changes things considerably. Would it be better instead if you just went with smaller turbos and used the nitrous to produce the extra power on the top end? If you're trying to get the best performance you can, you're going to have to use nitrous anyway to compensate for the shortcomings of your turbo choice. It would seem to me that having smaller/mid sized turbos and using nitrous to produce the extra power up top would be much more practical than having large turbos and needing nitrous to produce the extra power down low, because the 99% of the time that you're driving your car on the street you're in the low/mid rpm range. How much harder is it on the engine for you to give it a 150 shot to bring the car from 450 to 600 rwhp on smaller turbos instead of having large turbos that are capable of 600rwhp and using the nitrous to spool it up? Building a car that's out of its element 99% of the time just to have it perform good 1% of the time doesn't seem like a very good tradeoff. It would be needing help in the RPM range that you use most. I'd rather have a car that's in its element most of the time, and use a little help to make it perform well at the strip. There must be drawbacks to the small turbo/nitrous shot combo because if there weren't nobody would be using huge turbos and just using the nitrous to spool them up. Any thoughts?
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