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I thought I should continue the Reatta story a little bit further. I have been looking for photos of the first long distance trip, and I can see them in my minds eye, but they may not be digital being from about 1996 ? Anyone that has seen my posts with mostly performance "adjustments" knows these aren't professional in nature but more of a trial and error process, plus it is a learning experience. I will try to synopsize what and where I have looked for improvements with varying levels of success. Initially in the '90's it was the usual homemade air intake with a cone filter. Then it was a colder 160 degree thermostat sourced from a vendor of Grand National parts and tuning. This was coupled with a new PROM from ED Wright at Superchips. This had the net effect of a slight increase in performance at the higher end at this expense of low speed crispness and requirement for premium fuel. Also had the coolant fan operations changed to match the thermostat. Along the way, discovered and corrected the rear exhaust manifold restriction plus had all of the engine exhaust parts ceramic coated inside and out in titanium gray with heat shielding eliminated. That worked just fine and looks good, but costly. They hang on the wall now. Around this same time, about the turn of the century (which I never thought I would say), I spoke with a guy in Iowa that worked with the GN guys enlarging stock throttle bodies. I sent him one and he machined it larger internally and made a new throttle plate to match. The bigger throttle does have a tiny effect but I had to close it almost to the point of sticking in the bore to get the idle down. This same guy made an adapter cone for my first turbo to throttle body connection when that experiment began. Somewhere in there I removed the cat and replaced with a straight pipe. This was about the same time I came upon a flowbench forum that promoted homebuilt plans and techniques. I believed it evolved to be called Flowbench Tech now. I did build a very simple but reasonably powerful bench of my own which I used at first to test things like the stock cat. vs the straight pipe and later a replacement cat. Not satisfied, I purchased a junkyard engine, an '89, to "build". Bored .020" over, L27 replacement pistons with more compression height to approx. zero deck, hand ported stock heads and first use of flowbench for conventional testing. All very Rube Goldberg but educational. The stock engine with 92k miles on it went on a stand and parked in the corner. The new engine worked well. Definitely gained some performance in conjunction with my previous items. Of course I couldn't leave that alone so decided to try turbocharging since I had a welder and various collected used turbochargers. I also collected used exhaust manifolds and I think this is when I brought a used camshaft home from a donor engine that I was stripping of parts to cut up and modify. More on that later. This where the throttle body adapter comes in to blow directly into the MAF from the compressor of the turbocharger. A friend donated some used GN injectors and the whole works was built and installed with the replacement engine still in the car. The first drive was a revelation. The faster I went, the faster the car wanted to go. It boosted very quickly and it wanted to go. I had no tuning at this point, just the stock chip. Two things come together here, caused by my lack of knowledge. It boosted very quickly and had knock issues. This is when I got involved with Ryan at GM Tuners and he burned several chips for me over time. I had put together an engine that worked well naturally aspirated but when turbocharged, the quench or squish distance was in a bad place for suppressing knock, plus there was no intercooler to cool the inlet air. Over time we got it better, adding alcohol injection, changing the fueling and timing, adding a tps improver to get full fueling earlier, but the factory ECM can only read up to 170gm/sec and we blew right through that threshold within seconds of launch. That meant everything beyond the ECM charts was a guess. It did work well but had to be relatively gentle and aware. I put about 38k miles on that engine in both N/A and turbocharged form. More to follow Photos: First gen Flowbench from 2005, raw first gen turbo piping B4 black ceramic coating from 2003, first ceramic coated stock exhaust manifolds and first turbo installed from 2005