A few months ago, I started seeing the dreaded smoke out the exhaust issue. It began slowly but eventually got pretty bad. Turns out, the rear turbo seal went out. Not really a surprise as many of us know this pain. They were a pair of upgraded ATP turbos and, frankly, didn’t have many miles on them. I did beat them up pretty badly however. What’s interesting here is that I actually ran the world record for the platform (at the time) on the blown turbo…

That being said, I was never really happy with them. First, I was never excited about the customer service they offered. It was nothing too serious, just felt very impersonal. Not that I’m expecting to drink a beer with any of them, They were just very abrupt with many of my questions before the purchase. When I told them a seal went out, they sounded surprised. The have no repair kit available and wanted to charge me almost $900 for a repair…basically they just install a new center section. Nah…they were way too laggy anyway. I was NEVER able to tune out any sort of quicker spool and/or response out of them. Not without putting too much torque down and breaking something. I will admit though, they pulled like a freight train when they were in the upper range. So, instead, I started looking elsewhere. Well, Jordan turned me onto Matt’s Gen3R turbos. Very similar in size to the ATPs, but with a billet compressor wheel. This fact alone should allow for a small bit of additional throttle response and slightly quicker spool time.

Here’s a small comparison of the 2 compressor wheels side-by-side. Left is GH, right is ATP…

Will be interesting to see how different these will behave once I get them mounted. But before I do, there are a few small modifications I will be doing to them. Just as Jordan did, I will also be ceramic coating the turbine side using Jet Hot, who I’ve used for years and love what they do.

In addition to ceramic coating the hot side, I will be upgrading the wastegates to the TurboSmart ones. The ones that Matt provides on the 3Rs are the OEM wastegates (3PSI spring) and preloads them to another PSI. He states that they will hold up to 22PSI just fine, which I don’t honestly expect to exceed. The ATPs use a Garrett 0.5bar (~7PSI). The springs in the TurboSmart WG are 7PSI as well. However, after conferring with Matt on this change, he feels it wouldn’t hurt the turbos and may actually slight help in keeping the boost level up between shifts. He gave me the green light on the upgrade.