We were lucky enough to have a customer travel down to Vivid Racing this week with his Panamera Turbo to let us give it a check over on the power parts. This is the first Panamera I have been able to intimately look over.
First impression on the styling, love it. I saw these out here in AZ testing 2 years ago and have been a fan ever since. Couple things that caught my eye and were impressive are the size of the front brakes and the rear spoiler. The front brake rotors have holes on what would be the hat. Never seen this before… Almost like a venting system. The caliper is MASSIVE. Having had StopTech 6piston 380mm kits on our Ferrari and M5, we thought we have seen big. Even the GTR OEM brakes are big. The caliper is GINORMOUS!
The interior of this one is Tan with woodgrain. Very classy. The functions and controls I can imagine take some getting use to. The rear headroom is actually taller then it appears. Almost CLS like. Having played with a 2010 997.2 Turbo PDK, I learned their are some differences between the Pana Sport and Sport Plus. Another interesting thing I got to see as it went up to 100mph on the dyno is the rear spoiler. At 59mph I believe the rear spoiler comes up and out from the body seperating into 2 pieces. The owner said that at 130mph-ish it actually tilts forward to improve downforce!
Getting under the car, it has some serious under panels. All the way to the muffler tips the underside is covered. Almost like going 175mph would be nothing. The stock mufflers on this car were valve actuated for louder sound by boost pressure. Unlike pressing a button inside the car, these just open up at a certain pressure. This now common on many vehicles, my BMW 135I had this! Disconnect it and the valve is open all the time. Under the hood is pretty impressive. The 4.8L is stuffed in there. If you want to change the airfilter, the front bumper has to come off. The boost hoses use a new fitting unlike the 996TT and 997TT ones. There is definitely room to improve on the air intake system.
The car uses the standard diverter valves as seen on a 996TT and every Audi or VW 1.8T or 2.0T. That was nice. The turbos are integrated with the headers like on the N54 BMW and Nissan GTR. But could be modified easily for more power. Overall, with some tuning, exhaust system, couple bolt ons, this could be a Serial Killer Sedan!
Some other fun facts… We weighed the OEM wheels/tires. The 20″ wheels are a forged wheel and have the 295/35/20 tires. The complete rear weighed in at 59.5lbs. We weighed a random Pirelli 275/30/20 tire here to gauge how much of that was wheel to tire. That tire weighed in at 28.5lbs. The front wheel/tire combo weighed 53lbs.
So what are WE DOING to the car…
We have a complete Agency Power exhaust system to test. This includes the downpipes with high flow cats, midpipe and rear muffler system with quad tips. Each piece will be made modular so you can utilize it with the corresponding stock part or have a full turbo back. We did a baseline of the car in both standard, sport and sport plus mode. The car comes with 500hp to the crank and our baseline test yielded about 410awhp on 91octane. This is about accurate considering the Mustang AWD dyno gives about a 20-25% drivetrain loss. Our results with the exhaust system will be posted soon. As we said above, the diverter valves are the same on the Panamera Turbo as others, so we replaced the Bosch valves with our Agency Power ones to hold the boost more consistant on the top end RPMs. The OEM valves are notorious for bleeding off boost.
In the meantime, the customer was drawn to the security and craftmanship of the Poggipolini titanium lug bolts so we added those on there. For kicks, these save a total of 1lb over the stock ones.
Stay tuned for more updates and view all our updated images here – https://www.vividracing.com/forums/ga…ages.php?c=530
I love this car and can’t wait to see it tuned up a bit!
So here are some updates on the product testing of the Panamera Turbo. The car like we said originally came here for the exhaust testing. We had to make some changes with the midpipes but left the mufflers and the gorgeous quad tips. Our first test shows the difference with the stock to AP exhaust system. We did the tests in Standard, Sport, and Sport Plus but saw the best comparisons in Sport Plus so opted to show these Dynos. This would be real world situations as when wanting performance, you put the car in performance mode! Our baseline was 404awhp and 455ft/lbs to the wheels on a Mustang Dyno. With the exhaust we picked up a quality 16/16 gain to the wheels! The one part we really focused on here was the sound. The customer actually had another exhaust system on the car previous and had to remove it because of the intensive drone.
Our next test was comparing our new complete YPipe to the stock YPipe before the throttle body. This throttle body is the same size as the CTT TB we use on our 996TT and 997TT upgrade kits. The stock YPipe is a 2 piece (halfs) plasic Y design that is smooth on the inside. The bad part about the stock one is it goes from a 78mm ID at the throttlebody down to a appx 2inch 51mm diameter Y split which then goes to rubber boost hoses that expand under pressure. Both of these are a power robber! If you retain the stock design and stock diameter hoses, YOU CANNOT GAIN power no matter if the YPipe is cast or plastic. This is why we made a COMPLETE YPipe kit which retains a 3inch aluminum design all the way to the factory end piece connections.
So below you can see our dyno in standard mode showing the car with the stock Ypipe and our big YPipe kit. These are huge gains throughout the ENTIRE rpm band which is huge. Dyno proven, this is not something to see, its something you can feel. The more airflow you get into that throttlebody the more HP you will gain. Eliminating the rubber hoses which expand causing pressure fluctuation, you will gain power. This is the design behind out YPipe kit.
Here is the exhaust video. Enjoy!