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My first experience of these animals was a 1987 Volvo 480 turbo. 13 years old and the first car I owned that didn’t have a carburettor to fiddle with. I had not long got divorced due to my ex having a mid life crisis and a toyboy, and was now in a position to buy something that didn’t need to haul around a nagging  ***, 4 teenage kids and the assortment of stray dogs that ex kept giving a home to. That little Volvo fitted the bill nicely, low and wide, lightweight and lots of power yet could fit a couple of the girls in the back on the odd occasion I was allowed to see them.

I had made the choice of car, now all I had to do was find a good one. So many of the 480’s were rust buckets due to water ingression. Eventually found a decent example at a second hand dealers, but it took me 3 months of haggling to get the price down to where I wanted. It ran well enough in their lot and I didn’t road test it while haggling. None of the dashboard worked, but I found out that that was common due to poor quality connections and easy to fix.

When I did eventually get the price down and bought the car, I soon discovered why they were willing to drop the price. It drove out the lot fine, but the first hill I came to it backfired and lost all power. opened the hood and found one of the pipes from the intercooler had come off, due to no clamp. Once I nursed it home I got digging and found that the turbo had been replaced by a monkey with no real idea what he was doing. The alignment was bad and several pipe clamps were missing. Also the boost control valve that fed info to the computer was broken. All easy stuff to fix, and probably the reason the dealer was happy to drop the price. Spent a couple of weeks tinkering, putting the turbo right and also the electronics. Good education, that little beast had 5 computers on board, fuel and ignition were seperate, also a body module, dashboard and a final one for the ABS brakes. Way ahead of it’s time.

Discovered that the boost was limited by the computer to a rediculously low level, around 1.2 atmospheres. What a waste of potential power. With no way or knowledge of how to modify the computer I was feeling kind of stuck, but then the idea hit me.

Instead of doing brain surgery, change the information the computer receives.  I cut the sensor feed tube leading from the pressure side of the turbo to the control valve, added a ‘T’ piece and ran a tube from there into the dash, ending in a needle valve. By opening the valve I was able to bleed off some of the pressure the sensor was seeing, making it think it was below the cut off point.

For normal running I would leave the valve closed, but when I needed a short term boost of power for overtaking, just open the valve and hit it!! That car could spin its wheels at 60 mph in 3rd gear!!  That was my first experience of beating the computer. Don’t change the brain which costs big bucks, change the information going to it from the sensors.