Porsche Panamera Turbo Upgrade – Launched Flogged Dynoed

Back in 2005 I got my first Porsche 996 C2.  The 2001 996 was ballin for a then 25 year old.  This great car started Vivid Racing into the Porsche market.  Years later we would build a 800+ horsepower 997 Turbo and rocket to 206.2 mph at the Texas Mile event.  After that car we would journey nearly 48 hours to Newfoundland, Canada to race our 997.2 Turbo S in the famous Targa Newfoundland.  No other car platform has been so influential to us as a company besides the Subaru WRX that started us in 2001.  In between selling millions of dollars of products to customers across the globe, we get to put the Vivid into Vivid Racing by taking on special projects such as this Porsche Panamera Turbo.  Now I had a 2011 Panamera Turbo with a ECU flash and exhaust and simply loved it.  This is the ultimate sedan, touring car.  But never did it cross my mind to tear into it to upgrade the turbochargers and make this sedan a wicked machine with 200bhp more than stock.

As a vendor on the 6speedonline forums, we get a lot of attention and this customer Ben wanted us to hook it up.  So with months of conversation, Ben brought his Porsche Panamera Turbo down to Vivid Racing in Gilbert, Arizona from Las Vegas to undergo the transformation.  Ben had already partnered with a company to tweak a set of stock turbos.  In the pictures and video you can see how the compressor inlet is much bigger.  With the car already having a set of Fabspeed high flow cat downpipes and our Agency Power carbon fiber Y-pipe, we got Ben a Meisterschaft GTC exhaust like we had on our Project Panamera.  With the turbochargers installation being quite the undertaking, we knew that this car had to deliver some results.  With our ECU Tuning division, VR Tuned, we began the process of removing the ECU to read out the data in boot mode on the bench and prepare for the tuning ahead.

Ben’s turbo builder said these turbochargers should make 700 horsepower and that is where we needed to be.  Running any car on our Mustang all wheel drive dyno is a heart breaker.  But it does give you real world driving numbers replicating what the true load on the car would be.  Add in 91 octane for pump gas, we had the cards stacked against us.  When the car came in to the shop, we did a baseline dyno test.  All of our baseline dyno runs are done in 3rd gear unless it is a newer 8 speed vehicle we do those in 4th.  With fans ablazing, the car put down in standard mode 427 awhp and 438 ft/lbs of torque.  The Mustang dyno in AWD gives us about a 20% drivetrain loss typically.  With the car coming stock with 500bhp, this puts us about in that zone.  The Panamera ECU is a SDI6 and cannot be flashed via OBDII.  So we must flash the ECU on the bench in boot mode as pictured.  Each dyno run we do, we log the boost and afr and make fine adjustments.  Because of the ECU flashing process, this takes a bit of extra time.  However, what we end up with is excellence in performance, power, and driveability.  The difference in our baseline test to the final sport run test was just about 150 wheel horsepower and 90ft/lbs of torque.  With our drivetrain loss, this puts the Panamera Turbo at a blistering strong 700bhp!

Enjoy the video and pictures!  Any questions about the tuning, turbo building, or car, leave us a comment or email [email protected]!

Here is a comparison to our Porsche Panamera Turbo with the same Meisterschaft exhaust muffler and Agency Power Y-pipe running stock cats and a VR Tuned ECU Flash.  Since the car above already had the ypipe and the Fabspeed high flow cats, we have a difference in baseline tests of about 45 horsepower.  The stock cats are a HUGE restriction on any turbocharged car ecspiecally the 911 and Panamera, typically giving a larger increase in power than a muffler alone.  Since each car is calibrated differently, we believe this leaves us about a 20 horsepower variance in the 2 cars showing really how much power and performance the upgraded turbochargers and tuning did to the car.

Here is another Porsche Panamera Turbo we did that just had our Agency Power Y-pipe on it alone with stock exhaust and no tune.  You can see the small variance in the baseline numbers but get the picture of the affectiveness of parts like the downpipes, tuning, and turbo upgrade.