Switzer Upgrades the Tiptronic

SWITZER P800 TIPTRONIC IN GUARDS RED

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Tuners everywhere rejoiced when Porsche introduced an upgraded Tiptronic transmission with its 997 Turbo models. The five-speed automatic/manual, built for Porsche by German neighbors Mercedes-Benz, is capable of handling as much as seven hundred horsepower in some applications ... and, for most tuners, that's all the capacity they will ever need.

For Ohio-based Switzer Performance, however, 700 hp is far from enough. “We first noticed the limitations of the 997 Tiptronic with our P700 (l4) PKG, which, pushed hard on certain high-octane fuels, can cause slipping in the trans.,” explains Tym Switzer, owner and chief engineer of Switzer Performance. “When we released our P800 kit for the 997 Turbos, which makes over eight hundred horsepower, we were forced to limit sales to manual-transmission cars. This didn’t satisfy the customers who wanted the kind of ultimate straight-line performance that the Tiptronic can offer, and – to be frank - it didn’t satisfy us.”

After spending a considerable amount of time reprogramming Porsche's transmission control unit (TCU) software to increase the torque limits, Switzer realized that effectively putting more than seven hundred horsepower through the Tip cars would require something more than a software-based solution.

Working with development partners in the US and Europe, Switzer disassembled, upgraded, and rebuilt the Tiptronic transmission to meet customer demands for higher hp projects. The first builds produced transmissions that were stronger and sharper than the factory unit, but not strong enough to contain Tym's hard-hitting P800. This final effort, however, Switzer and his European counterparts pulled out all the stops: additional clutches eliminate slippage, additional friction surfaces ensure more efficient power delivery, a modified valve body to improve shift speed, and (last, but not least) another round of transmission programming which enables the Tiptronic to make the most of its uprated internals.

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MORE STACK HEIGHT + BETTER MATERIALS

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On its maiden voyage, the new 997 Turbo P800 Tiptronic blasted from 0-60 mph in a scant 2.8 seconds. On standard tires. With standard air pressure. On pump gas.

Subsequent tests confirm that Switzer had produced one of the quickest daily-driver Porsches in history - and Tym isn’t shy about using the “B-word” in discussing the car’s performance, either. “These cars have Bugatti performance from 0-60. We’re still perfecting the calibrations, but we expect our clients will go Veyron hunting very soon, and those guys don't like to lose.”

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STRAP YOURSELF IN AND FEEL THE G'S

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Switzer is in no hurry to share the precise secrets of building nine-hundred-horse-capable Tiptronic transmissions, but the company is perfectly willing to build up transmissions for owners of other tuner cars, as well. “Of course, I have to believe that our P800 kit continues to be the ideal daily-driver/trackday package, but some clients have a comfortable working relationship with TechArt or 9ff. They still want a quicker Tiptronic car that they can turn up the boost on, though, and we can work with them to make that happen, and help them get the most out of the investment they've already made” says Switzer.

Drivers who participate in 0-100 or 1/8 mile dragstrip challenges may find Switzer P800 Tiptronic to be the perfect weapon; with the PCCB ceramic brakes and the 911’s traditionally brake-friendly weight distribution, 0-100-0 supremacy is all but assured.

Switzer's transmission upgrades start at 7990 USD, but anyone who wants to hit a hundred miles per hour before the most supercars make their way to sixty may consider it money well spent.

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You can see a full, high-resolution photo gallery on Flickr!

Boulder Nissan Takes Switzer P800 to 191 at Texas

SWITZER P800 GTR NISSAN TAKES ON TEXAS

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191 mph on 93 octane – wow!

After winning the GTR class at the TX2K10 shootout, our hot-shoe driver Jason pushed his Boulder Nissan | Switzer P800 GTR to more than 191 mph at last weekend's Texas Mile!

Keep in mind, Jason and his tech Eric built this car with an out-of-the-box P800 kit from Switzer Performance, with Switzer's “canned” roadrace calibrations and tuned to 93 octane … and the car ran STRONG at two grueling back-to-back weekend events, proving that Eric can wrench as well as Jason can drive, for sure!

Congratulations to the Boulder Nissan crew – you made us all look great, and it seems like you had fun doing it, too. We can't wait to hear about your next adventure with Godzilla!

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Photo courtesy of Adam Barerra.

Switzer R850 GTR Nissan

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Tym's turned this shop into something of a breeding-ground for pump-gas monsters this year, with the 800 hp P800 GTRs - making over 300 more hp than their OE Nissan brethren - being some of the quickest of the bunch.

Of course, more is expected in this business and too much is never enough, so as soon as Switzer's customers got their hands on the cars, they started asking for more power still.

"How much will it make on race gas? That was the first question, right out of the box," explains Tym. "We've developed the 'P' packages as daily-use products that wouldn't force you to buy race gas or excessively strain the driveline. We wanted to make an 800 hp car that was a true daily driver, and we accomplished that ... but someone always wants more. We've bent a bit to the demands of those customers that are using their GTRs primarily as trackday cars, and developed a new 'R' package specifically for them."

The "R", in this case, refers to race fuel - as the "P" in "P800" referred to the fact that the package was developed for "pump gas" - and with better fuel comes, of course, more boost, and more power. "We're seeing consistent dyno results in excess of 740 all-wheel-horsepower and 715 lb-ft, pull after pull. Most everyone seems to agree that the GTR has about a 15% driveline loss. Based on that, this kit is making well over 850 hp and 820 lb-ft at the crank."

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As with all of Switzer's GTR packages, this kit builds power very similarly to the stock R35, before the boost really begins to kick in above 3500 rpm. "This helps preserve the trans. in the car, but it's right on the edge. The P800 is still the ultimate everyday car. This car, tuned like this, is something else."

Scary stuff. Dyno video, below.

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Pricing for the new R850 PKG from Switzer is set at $20990, which includes pump gas and race fuel tunes, as well as Switzer's updated cooling PKG, and features a massive dual-core radiator, thermostat, and revised Switzer MONSTER intercoolers.

Contact your Switzer dealer for more.

Growing Pains (sha la la la)

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The Switzer blog and forum accounts have been pretty quiet recently, and I'm sure many of you have been wondering about what we've been up to "behind the scenes". So what, exactly, have we been up to?

The short answer is "We've been working 12-15 hour days, every day, for the last 2 months."

The less-short answer is that ever since Sharif at Forged Performance approached us about becoming a Switzer installer, we've been making detail changes to our GTR packages to make them more installer-friendly. This is quite a lot easier said than done!

See, here at Switzer, we've always done the majority of our own installs, so if we needed a mounting bracket to be done a certain way, we made it. If we needed an extra washer here or a different bolt-length there, we walked across the shop and pulled it from a drawer. There were no installation manuals, either - we simply remembered what we did the last time, or just referred to a shop notebook for the tricky bits.

As you can imagine, this not The Way To Do Things when you are trying to ship a "ready-to-install" package halfway across the country or across the world; which is exactly what we are trying to do!

Today, we find ourselves growing - and growing fast!

Over the past few months, we've been transforming Switzer Performance from a small, custom tuning shop to a (less small?) manufacturer of bolt-on performance packages based on the "built-to-order" products we've delivered to our clients so far. These packages need to be designed around a single fact: that our dealers may have knowledgeable, experienced technicians to do their installs, but if he doesn't see things exactly the way we do, the pieces we send start to blend together; and where we see a kit, he sees a puzzle!

So, Tym and the rest of the crew downstairs got to work, trying to anticipate - and duplicate! - any hiccup or misstep that a shop may come across. At the same time, they looked at each and every component in the original "in-house" package, and asked how it could be improved, changed, and tweaked to make installations go more smoothly ...

... the results are some of the new parts you see below, which include new lines for the turbos, new blow-off-valves, machined MAF housings for the intakes, updated actuators, and custom silicone hose kits. Less obvious changes include a simpler order-of-operations, a new, more complete hardware kit, and a major (for us!) financial commitment to have our Switzer modified turbos and MONSTER intercoolers ON THE SHELF AND READY TO GO, eliminating a 10-15 day wait to get the stock cores machined out.

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MACHINED MAF SENSOR HOUSING

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UPDATED BLOW OFF VALVE

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MODIFIED 2010 R35 GTR TURBOS

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Along the way, we've been able to make a few improvements as well. The new lines are more efficient. The new intakes provide better flow. The new cooling package that drastically reduces engine and trans. temperatures on the street and the track.

Did I forget to mention the new cooling package?

Simply put, Nissan's R35 GTR is still new to the marketplace and very new to every tuner. Many of you have been following us along our Nissan tuning path since the beginning, and followed Derek Whitis' Freedom Autosport GTR throughout the 2009 OneLap of America, where the car experienced a number of issues and frequently went into "limp-mode", leading Whitis' team to call it quits about halfway through the event. It was a heart-breaker for all of us, and we found ourselves with lots of questions, lots of theories, and not a whole lot of answers.

Another thing we had lots of, however, was data.

For data to become useful information, it needs careful analysis and a complete understanding of the systems involved. Through additional testing and comparisons between tuned cars (thanks, JR!), stock cars (thanks, Doug!), and the Freedom Autosport car (thanks, Derek!) we were able to isolate many of the issues that gave the car problems. Some of these issues were simple (low coolant), some were simply unexpected (caused by changes to the front and rear outside tire diameters), and some were truly bizarre (I don't even want to TALK about front splitters anymore!).

All of this research, development, testing, verification, and implementation takes time. Sometimes the process takes longer than you anticipate, but we firmly believe that a dedicated R&D program driven by the scientific method will beat "looking under the hood and thinking as hard as you can" any day.

The fruits of this research and 1000 miles of logged track-data from our customers is what led to the detail improvements mentioned above being integrated into our "mass-production" packages, and the development of our all-new cooling package, which we've bundled with our updated P700/800 packages. The new cooling package, in concert with the rest of the updates mentioned above, doesn't take away from the smooth drive-ability of our kits - it simply makes the day to day driving experience that much more like a stock car ...

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SWITZER RADIATOR - SHOWN WITH CONDENSER

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SWITZER RADIATOR - SHOWN WITH STOCK R35 RADIATOR

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... it also lets us push the cars Harder where it counts: on the track.

The Switzer P700/800 GTR Nissans have always been powerful street cars that were capable of impressing even the toughest critics at the track. With these new updates, we've been able to create a more bulletproof product that makes the P700/800 into a dominant track day weapon that is every bit as smooth and tractable as the stock R35.

We'll have a full update and product/pricing release on the updated P700/800 packages later this week, as well as a new "R" PKG that will be ready before you know it.

Here's one last pic of the finished install ... enjoy!

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UPDATED 2010 SWITZER P800 PKG - INSTALLED

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Finally, to all of our friends, customers, and dealers: thank you for your continued patience with us as we push through these growing pains. I promise (as those of you who have gotten your cars already know) it will be worth the wait.

GT2 Porsche Tuning PKGs up to 800 HP

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2009 has been a busy year for us here at Switzer Performance. In January, our thousand-horsepower, 9-second SLEDGEHAMMER project car introduced the world to Tym's Oberlin, Ohio-based tuning house, and we followed up that debut act in February when a number of our customer cars ran 10 second 1/4 miles in 700 hp fully-automatic 997 turbo Porsches. March saw the introduction of our Nissan R35 GTR performance upgrades, good for up to 800 hp on 93 octane pump gas.

This week, Tym Switzer is introducing his latest customer-ready performance packages for Porsche's outstanding 997 GT2. The new GT2 packages range from a simple software revision to Switzer's comprehensive flagship offering: the $39,000, 800 hp GT2 PKG shown (installed) in these pictures. "This 800 horsepower pump-gas package has evolved from those first SLEDGEHAMMER builds," explains Tym, "but unlike the SLEDGEHAMMER, which used a stand-alone system, we've been able to keep the factory DME, making this a true bolt-on package. Everything else that went into the SLEDGEHAMMER builds is in this package, running on pump 93."

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Switzer's 800 hp GT2 package makes use of custom Garret GT30R-based turbochargers with custom billet compressor wheels on ball-bearing center sections in lightweight stainless turbine housings. Switzer's upgraded turbos compress massive amounts of air, while generating heat than the stock units - heat which is channeled to the engine through Switzer's own MONSTER intercoolers. The engine itself is fed air and fuel through larger injectors and a custom intake plenum with an oversized throttle-body. All this hardware is managed by the stock ECU, running Switzer-specific DME software calibrations. Perhaps the most controversial part of Switzer's package, however, is the exhaust system. Switzer's GT2 exhales through a GT2-specific version of the company's existing 997 TT exhaust. "As much as we would have liked to stick with the GT2's titanium canister, there was just no way to hit our power goal on pump gas with the stock system. It was just too restrictive and not designed to handle this much airflow."

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Switzer's stated goal for the GT2 project was 800 crank horsepower on 93 octane pump gas with an efficient, linear power curve that efficiently put power to the ground and didn't punish the driver with sudden spikes in torque and power. One look at the final dyno results (see video, above - about a minute in) reveals those goals have been met. "We were very happy to hit our target numbers, of course, but the best part is that the car is still so manageable on the street, at this power level. It is an everyday hyper-performing exotic, and I can't wait to get it out on the track and see how it performs in the hands of a really talented driver."

The Switzer Performance 800 hp GT2 Porsche package is available now through Switzer Performance dealers. CLICK HERE for more.