Special thanks to Dynolab of Marietta, GA for providing the dyno testing facilities for this test.

For some reason, I was expecting to see this motor put down somewhere around 178 to 180whp, and that's pretty much exactly what we got. Note that the torque curve is virtually flat (+- 5 lb-ft) from just over 2500 rpms to over 7500 rpms. For the test, cold tire pressure was set at the factory recommended 31psi. The car had 1045 miles on the odometer at the time of the dyno test, so with another 5000-10000 miles of break-in, we might even see dynosheets showing another 3 to 5 hp. The car produced very consistent results run after run, and the cooling system seemed to have no problem keeping the coolant temps in check, easily settling to a rock solid 180F several minutes after each fourth gear pull.

We did a test run with an open intake, in an effort to gauge the restriction of the stock airbox. As you can see in the following plot, we saw a gain of around 7WHP.

For those interested, a video clip of one of the dyno runs is available below:

Right Click and Save

I was hoping to be able to pull up the run file from our 2002 RSX Type-S dyno test to show a direct comparison, but it seems that the data may have been permanently lost as a result of a system hard drive failure. We do have the image of the plot however, so you can see the results below. It should be noted that the 2002 RSX-S we tested was a rather weak example, posting only 158whp in stock configuration