Why Ferrari doesn't like turbos

[Charon]

Found this item in Yahoo News. http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cult...turbocharging/
Some of it echos my experience with my Winnebago Lesharo Diesel, especially the parts about turbo lag and two torque curves.

[Draigflag]

Which part echoes your experiance Charon? Driving a high performance Ferrari sports car and a 30 year old diesel caravan are basicaly the same thing, you should send them a job application

[trollbait]

I think I may have experienced this while pulling away from a light, but I'm usually in not such a rush. For daily driving, turbo lag really isn't an issue. Or it shouldn't be if people didn't drive like nuts. Fortunately for them, we will start seeing hybrid turbochargers.

Really an electric supercharger which might have a turbine generator in the exhaust, the amount of compression it supplies isn't tied to engine speed. So you can have boost at idle if you want it.

[Draigflag]

Turbo's are amazing, there are people running 800hp from a 2.0L thanks to turbos, even VW manage to put over 540 BHP in a 2.0L without sacrificing economy, reliability etc. Now they are even using supercharged and turbocharged egnines at the same time.

Charon, I think you missed the entire point of the turbo...

[Charon]

The turbo diesel was a 2.0 liter Renault with a 4-speed gearbox, fairly wide ratio. The turbo, like all turbos, needs exhaust gas flow to make it work. With the engine at low revs (the unit was not equipped with a tach) the turbo did nothing. Starting from rest, in first gear, the unit would accelerate, then the turbo would spool up, and the acceleration became livelier. If the unit were not pretty well wound up in first, the shift into second would slow the engine to the point where it "fell off" the turbo, and the thing would accelerate slowly until the turbo came up again. This happened at every gear change. The practical effect was that, to use the turbo, the engine had to be wound up every time and the shift had to be made fairly quickly. Diesels do not have the wide rev range of gas engines (according to the service manual, if the throttle were floorboarded with the unit in Neutral, the fuel controller would limit revs to something like 5K). There were times on mountainous upgrades when I could not upshift, because the unit would slow enough during the upshift that the turbo would not pick up in the next higher gear.

The Ferrari article mentioned the trick gasoline turbocharged engines have of injecting extra fuel into the engine on high power. Aircraft have been doing it for decades. Takeoffs (recip engines) are usually made with the mixture control in "Full Rich." This is too rich. The extra fuel does not burn - there is not enough air for it. It evaporates, and its evaporation helps cool the engine at takeoff. It is called "fuel cooling." It is wasteful of fuel, it emits unburned hydrocarbons, but it keeps the engines alive. It also helps prevent detonation under conditions of high pressure and temperature. Turbocharged auto engines apparently do the same thing.

[Draigflag]

The article is utter pants. It talks about 1 manufacturer and thier valid reasons. But you can't base your opinions of every car with a turbo on that heap you never learnt to drive properly before I was even born. The fact is, a turbo offers better performance and economy for 99.999% of engines. If you can show me a naturaly aspirated engine with as much power and economy as a turbocharged unit, please show me. Mercedes make the most powerful with about 570 hp, but its a 6.0L, as mentioned, a turbo allows similar power from an engine 3 times smaller. You seem have this hatred for all things turbocharged and all things diesel, and you'll try and find anything on the web to try and make yourself feel better about it without the experiance or facts.

[Jcp385]

For me, Ferrari's turbo aversion is more about tradition than anything. But with even Ferrari phasing out real manuals, I'm losing a lot of respect for them.

[Draigflag]

Originally Posted by Jcp385

For me, Ferrari's turbo aversion is more about tradition than anything. But with even Ferrari phasing out real manuals, I'm losing a lot of respect for them.

I with you on that one, when you can hand build a V8 that can rev to 9000 rpm, you really don't need a turbo. Performance and economy have never been issues for cars of this nature, hence why most don't even consider turbos. But in smaller cars, or diesels, they make perfect sense as a way to boost performance and economy. As for manual boxes, I know, everyone is using duel clutch flappy paddles now, great for performance but they do take the element of enjoyment out of driving. I was glad to see they are starting to sell the new F type Jaguar with a manual box, they will sell so many more now.

[RunningOnFumes]

They have enough problems with long-term reliability. Adding a turbo would only make things worse.

[Draigflag]

Im not sure adding a turbo makes a car less reliable, almost everything is turbocharged and/or supercharged in Europe for performance, economy and emission reasons and ive never heard of a turbo failing. But its a different story in Supercars, obviously every component is under extra stress so I get your drift