[Jake Raby]

First off, I appreciate your objective view of what we are doing.

Without significant mileage on multiple samples, how do you have confidence that your rebuilds and improvements will not blow up in their own unique ways?

Porsche did a lot of work for us, and we have not had to start from scratch.. We have addressed the problematic areas with enhanced procedures and components that Porsche could not have afforded to do with engines created in very high volumes. The 911(pre water) never had these issues, because it was a much lower produced vehicle and more time was put into each unit as well as money.

Do some research on our past efforts with earlier engines and you'll see that we have taken other engines, totally redesigned them and made them go from a "Black sheep" to something highly sought after. The best case would be the Porsche 914 engine which we can now double the output of N/A and still attain the longevity of a bone stock engine. A factory 914 engine was anemic and plagued with cylinder head issues, through development we haven't had a single head related failure in a decade.

We have done this through rigorous testing in harsh environments where neglect and abuse was common... An example of this is driving a Boxster against the rev limiter for two miles at a time, trying to create a failure... (I try to do that every time I drive the test car)

I love to break parts and I love to force failures to study what happens, we have been known to scatter engines in front of a crowd of 500 under Nitrous just to see what occurs and how spectacular we can make something fail.. Breaking parts is part of success with engine design and modification.

This is not something we have just started working with and quite honestly the ONLY reason I initially agreed to assist Charles with the development was because of the challenge the engine offered. Tackling an engine with so many issues. that is so hard to work with was right up my alley- he knew that.

Doesn't a engine designer run at least 20 cars for at least 100k miles both in simulation and on real roads in multiple climates (and even then designs and manufacturing techniques prove inadequate)?

Think Porsche did that??? HELL NO! If they did they would have never released the car until all the BS gripes were worked out! Based on the failures that everyone has documented, that we have seen at as low as 30K miles it is clear that Porsche let these engines fly out the door before anyone put close to 1100K on the first one.

In the days of the aircooled Porsche, (and VW) German soldiers were often tasked with driving the cars for tens of thousands of miles to prove their endurance and integrity- that clearly does not happen today.

How can you duplicate such testing?

Extreme effort and attention to concern. No one forces us to test anything, we don't do it because we have to. We do this because I WANT to!

I am currently outfitting the test car with a Race-Technology DL-2 data logger that will observe both the OBD2 sensors and outputs along with 16 more channels of data acquisition that will be used to monitor all critical aspects of the engine. I have used a similar unit with our vintage development program to gain data over both street and competition environments. See this page for the data we gathered on a recent 3,450 mile trek cross the Continent to test colling system enhancements and lubricants for our Air-cooled engine program
www.aircooledtechnology.com/crosscountry

While on this trip we made a run up Loveland Pass, to the Continental Divide. When we reached the summit we met up with a pair of Engineers from Chrysler that were using the 12,000' elevation to program the ECU for their new pick up truck engine. We started chatting with them, looked at their gear and then they looked at ours and asked us why the hell we had 3 computers and 28 channels of data logging in a 40 year old car... I explained it to them and this is the reply the lead Engineer gave me.
"Damn, thats impressive, I have worked here for 18 years and we've never driven a car across the country to gather data".

We may not have the funding of a vehicle manufacturer like Porsche or Chrysler, but we damn sure have the initiative and drive to accomplish what they couldn't. We have done it before and we'll do it again! The team we have assembled is made up of highly motivated "fire pissers" like yours truly who live, eat and breathe mechanical modification..

I certainly don't want to come off like an egotistical jerk, but we are confident that what we are creating will be effective and we have been and will continue to put it to the test of both time and performance.

Building engines, lab testing them and then field testing them, followed by periodic tear downs to observe the goings on internally are the minimum of what we do. Heck I have been known to change cams in one engine 11 times in a single week just to see the gains in performance for a street engine, and that meant a complete tear down of the test engine each time...

We don't sleep much.