2014-02-27

Editor’s Note: Brad Beardow, owner of 1552 Design, was once on our editorial staff. After he departed to rebuild his firm fifteen52 Design into a burgeoning wheel company, he’d pitched us on the idea of doing a Mk1 TT project car. Brad’s always been known for quirky and intriguing builds, and his main point of swapping in a turbocharged 2.5-liter 5-cylinder had us at hello.

As project cars are want to do, it never really materialized as quickly as we all hope and as such the build never really manifested itself as a series on this site. The car was completed though, and Brad’s listed it for sale over on fifteen52′s own blog and run it as sort of a feature story. We’re running it here as well.



[Begin Story, words: Brad Beardow, photos: Andrwe Schwartz]

The title to this feature could have been any number of things. “The Most Inconvenient Project Car Ever” comes to mind…

We’ll get to that bit of drama shortly, but let’s first take a look at what we’ve got here. It’s a 2004 Audi TT that began life as a 225 hp version 1.8T 6-speed quattro. It’s painted the original factory Dolomite Grey and features a grey leather interior. We purchased this car back in 2010 from a very good customer of our Sarasota, FL location. The car had 180k miles on it and a blown turbo. Though it was a high-mile car, our customer was known (and loved by us) for his meticulous care of his automobiles (of which he had many). We had been servicing the car for a couple years and knew it intimately. With an almost perfect exterior and interior, a fully-pixeled instrument cluster, and the aforementioned maintenance history, when our customer decided it was time to move on to a new  TT RS, we jumped at the chance to purchase this amazingly clean Mk1.

I’m not a big fan of the Volkswagen Group’s ubiquitous 1.8T engine. Yeah, I said it. I love how it moved VW and Audi as companies so far along in the US, but as an engine, even with big power adders, it just never felt much more to me than a small tractor motor being powered by a giant, lazy coiled-up rubber band. The latest 2.0 TFSI line of engines has answered all of my issues with the 1.8T (mostly a function of adding direct injection to the mix), but when it comes to Volkswagen Group cars I’m pretty old school and still prefer removing little engines and replacing them with larger ones. Since Audi already put a VR6 in the Mk1 TT, what would be the point of that? And didn’t all the cool Audis once come with 5-cylinder engines, anyway? And, Volkswagen puts 5-cylinder engines in thousands of modern Mk5 Rabbits, Jettas, and New Beetles, right?



After gathering all the information I could on the new VW 2.5-liter engines, transmissions, management and other various details, I went ahead and purchased a nice 22,000-mile engine from a New Beetle. Why an New Beetle? It made sense to me because the New Beetle is essentially the Volkswagen Group Mk4 A-chassis, but with the newer engine and ECU. The Mk1 TT is also a Mk4-chassis car, so…yeah. Other good reasons to go NB were the fact it uses a hydraulic power-steering set-up (Mk5 cars have an electric pump), and a hybrid Mk4/Mk5 engine mount (and we needed that). Finally, the New Beetle 2.5 engine harness is modular, so I figured using it would simplify the re-wiring process. The 2.5-liter cars use ME7 management (as does the Mk1 TT), so we were good to go there. How easily would the TT’s ESP and Haldex systems integrate with the new engine and ECU? We were anxious to find out the answer to that and many other questions. You see, at the time we were the only ones that we knew of anyone mounting a transverse (Dialynx in the UK has been swapping in longitudinal Audi engines) 5-cylinder engine into a Mk1 TT quattro.

In short order our team yanked out the 1.8T and fit the new 2.5. As expected it fit perfectly, but we quickly realized that existing cast turbo 2.5 manifolds would not clear the transmission’s transfer case. So that meant time to custom-fabricate up something cool. Did I forget to mention earlier that we were going to turbocharge this 2.5? With only 170hp being delivered in naturally-aspirated form, the Volkswagen 2.5 was never going to cut it when it came to replacing the stock 225 hp 1.8T, so turbocharging was planned at the beginning. We’d been installing quite a few C2 Motorsports 2.5T kits over the past year and felt good knowing we had software solutions available from the get-go. Former fifteen52 partner at the time, Shawn Grawunde (now owner of the Fab Factory in Tampa, FL) got to work fabricating that exhaust manifold we just mentioned, a 3″ downpipe and turbo-back exhaust, short-runner intake manifold, and all the required intercooler piping.



Regarding the new engine’s desire to mate with TT’s 02M 6-speed quattro transmission, since the 2.5 engine is basically a variation of VW’s four-cylinder family of engines, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that its bell-housing mounted quite nicely to the TT’s transmission. Actually, there was a surprise; one we learned later. You see, for some reason the 2.5 has a little bit of extra material on its engine block, right around the timing chain cover area. It’s hard to see by just eyeballing, but it’s enough to interfere with transmission case once everything is torqued down. What happens is that the extra material tweaks the timing chain cover enough that it will break and start spewing oil. All over the clutch. Not good. Yes, we found this out the hard way since this info wasn’t known at the time. In fact, though we’ve done some shaving, we still have a slight oil leak due to needing just a bit more material removed, but since it’s not fouling the clutch so we’ll let the new owner take care of that (this writing technique is called foreshadowing).

For this project we were looking for around 350whp and research suggested we’d be okay keeping the stock (low-mile) bottom end and using a C2 Motorsports low-compression headgasket. For the new hardware we went with a Precision Turbo 5857 turbo (.82 A/R), Precision’s 38mm wastegate, some larger injectors, converted the 2.5 fuel rail to incorporate the 1.8T’s return system, added a Walbro fuel pump, the C2 head-gasket, and of course, C2 Motorsports software (custom baseline map for our specs). And then the car sat. And sat. And then sat some more…

The above work was being done in the middle of our 2010 company restructuring. Shawn was leaving to go do his own thing, fifteen52 was moving toward offering just products (no more crazy customer projects), and most important to this story, we were closing the Florida location and focusing only on the SoCal store. The original idea was to get the TT finished before all of these deadlines closed in on us. That was the plan, yes, but we all know how project car plans tend to go. Before we could get the car wired up and running we closed the Florida shop and the TT went into storage. Over time it’s seen some attention, but aside from a really solid tune by Jared Van Leuven, not a whole lot of progress has been made.

Fast forward to today and the car is still not 100% complete. Over the past couple years we’ve had some help getting all the wiring challenges sorted, but for a while now the idea has been to just get it running and drivable and when the time is right we’d get back to sorting the entire harness (or possibly go stand-alone management), spend the time and money to get a final tune, and then finally enjoy the car the way we had always planned. We’ve added a set of KW’s ST coilovers, a set of excellent Black Forest Industries billet engine mounts, and our own fifteen52 Forged monoblock 18×8.5 Tarmac 348 wheels, but otherwise the car is little changed from when we closed down the Florida shop. And now it’s for sale.

Why sell the car now? The fact is we’ve just got too much going on and finishing this car isn’t a priority. It’s a great daily driver, sounds amazing, and makes good power (still needs the cam phasing adjusted), and we think it’s time for some properly motivated individual to come and take it to the next level. If that describes you, and you’ve got around $17,500 handy, then get in touch with us and we’ll give you the fully skinny on the car.

More Information HERE.

The post Find of the Day: 2.5 Turbo Converted Mk1 Audi TT by fifteen52 appeared first on Fourtitude.com.

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