Sprintexnet - Railways

Sprintex & Supercharging

Back in the late 80’s there were a few tuning companies making performance kits for the V6 Cologne engine, most notably Turbo Technics and Janspeed, both offering various turbocharger kits for the earlier 2,792cc version. However, Power Engineering (PE) thought they would use a slightly different approach and developed a supercharger kit in conjunction with Dennis Priddle Racing using a Sprintex S102 twin-screw supercharger. They sold somewhere in the region of 80-90 of these kits before Ford then redesigned the engine taking it out to 2,933cc and adding Electronic Fuel Injection (as opposed to the Mechanical setup used previously) as well as many other revisions. Changes were made to the supercharger kit to suit, simplifying the pipework into the new plenum chamber and including an add-on ECU to enable fine-tuning of fuelling and ignition-retard in conjunction with the standard Ford EEC-IV ECU. Unfortunately only 10 or so of these kits were sold before Sprintex went out of business in the UK and the supply of superchargers dried up!! PE then turned their attention to producing big-capacity normally aspirated engines instead of up to 3.7 litres.

The twin-screw design supercharger differs from the more common Eaton type (used in the BMW Mini Cooper S and the Jaguar XJR among others) in that it internally compresses the air charge before delivering it to the engine, whereas the Eaton has no internal compression and literally blows the air in. Below are two cutaway examples to show the internals.

Although Sprintex (ATG) have redesigned their superchargers more than once since this one was produced they are still very helpful in supplying spares and provided me with two full kits of bearings and seals at what I would consider a reasonable price.

The kit came into my possession as a result of the previous owner not being able to get it tuned properly, so my first job was to try to find out how to tune the add-on ECU, everything else after that being purely mechanical. I rang PE and spoke to various people there, but only limited knowledge of the kit still existed but they said they would be happy to “give it their best shot” on the rolling-road anyway. Then one of the guys said “oh, apparently one of the blokes who used to work here now works in the unit next door, hang on I’ll go and get him”. So I explain to this person what kit I’ve got, what the add-on ECU looks like and I came away with a name and a phone number. Ten minutes and another phone call later and it turns out the guy who designed it now resides at ERL, the company who make Aquamist Water Injection kits, and he’s more than helpful with my problem. Yes he remembers the ECU well, yes he still has the original instructions for it, and yes he’ll happily post them out to me for nowt if I give him my address. RESULT!!! Thanks mate!