My 1988 900 Aero – The Silver Sled

The "Silver Sled" history

The ”Silver Sled” was purchased in December 1996 for aud$19,000 with 201,000km on the clock, and is known as a 900 T16 Aero in Australia with similar specs to the USA variant and collectible known as the SPG. However a few things are different with this Australian version – a whale tail from factory, stock Aero vent covers on the rear quarter panels, a few more colour variations such as the metallic silver and a 5 speaker surround sound Alpine Stereo unit with Alpine amp.

Amongst all the normal maintenance items in the course of ownership, I have replaced the timing chain at 220,000km, head gasket (twice), replaced the brake master cylinder, swapped the turbo from the OEM Garret AiResearch T3 to a Mitsubishi TE-05 unit found on 1991+ C900 (and I have now upgraded it to a Jak Stoll Performance Mitsubishi TE-05 with 16G). I have also had to get a new AMM (005) three times now after the have failed. As a bit of a performance upgrade and to keep the charge air cooler, I have added an Aquamist water injection.

The Silver Sled appeared in the July 2001 edition of Australian Motor magazine in an article about past performance cars. Click on the following link to download a pdf (1.1mb) of the article. With special thanks to Cameron McGavin and Ellen Dewar from the Australian Magazine Motor for their permission to display the images. Click here

Dyno Run

I did a dyno run back in March 2000 that showed 120kW at the wheels (estimated to be 155kW at fly wheel with drive train loss factored in). Converted to horse power this is about 210hp. Torque is 325Nm (252 lb ft). In stock form the 900 Aero was rated 118kW at the crank. The upgrades for this dyno run in 2000 were moderate and included SPG9s Stage 2.5 APC and RRFPR. An important note was the ambient temperature at 28C... not really conducive to many high power runs, even with a fan blowing onto the front of the car. First run was with the 3.0 BAR FPR, which resulted in sever pinging above 14psi of boost. This was easily fixed with swapping to an SPG9 RRFPR and fuel pressure upped and corrected. Boost was 14psi for the run, but it still had some problems, which now looking back can be attributed to a faulty AMM and LH ECU. However this was before a lot of major upgrades and fine tuning.

You can see from the list at the left I have added a lot of performance upgrades since 2000, and I think the output of the "Silver Sled" would now be around 190kW (250hp).