We’ve got a lot of questions through our history on facebook, our website, emails and every other way imaginable about how to get more power to a turbodiesel car.

Now we thought is was time to answer them all in a series of videos that will be published the upcoming five weeks. We will buy a cheap Mercedes Benz turbodiesel and build it on a budget to be a cool street legal daily driver. This car is what we imagine a lot of people that follow us would like to build/own. Everything will be built on a budget and the money spent will be shown after each episode. We will try to explain what we do and why, the way we do it is our way but surely not the correct way to do it.

We hope that you will have fun watching this but also maybe learn something.

Sincerely

Black Smoke Racing

Continue reading about Part 1 and finding the right car.

The first episode is about finding the right car, which in this case was not the easiest part of the build. We wanted a cheap, Mercedes Benz turbodiesel car, the car also needed to be older than 1992 (in Finland newer ones are low-emission and you cannot make changes to the engine.) This left us with two models, w124 and w201.

The reason why we chose the w201 was that it is a bit cheaper, it’s lightweight and it’s the first car Teemu started drifting with. W201 has three different diesel engine options, 2,0 non-turbo, 2,5 non-turbo and 2,5 turbo. Ideally you would choose the 2,5 turbo but they can be hard to find and in many cases expensive. We had already found a 2,5 turbo but it turned out to be low-emission registered, so we had to settle for a 2,5 litre non-turbo version. If you’re going to use a non-turbo version you need to remember that the connection rods are weaker, the pistons are not oil cooled and you have to make the exhaust manifold yourself (or find one from a turbo version.) Depending on in which country you’re going to MOT test the car you’ll maybe need to upgrade the sway bar and the front brakes also.

The car we found was a 2,5 non-turbo with an automatic gearbox for 600€, quite cheap.

To do list (list may change hourly!):

Change the transmission to a 6 speed w211 manual one

Mount a 200D flywheel

Mount a MB Sprinter Clutch

Buy and fit a exhaust manifold

Fit a turbo

Fit an intercooler and do the piping

Sand it and fix rust

Paint it

Lower it!

Find some nice rims!

Fix audio!!

Take the car to a Dyno and get exhaust and power readings.

MOT test it.

Drive and have fun!

Budget:

We estimate that we will be able to build the car for about 3000€. This far we have spent 600€ on the car but we we’re able to sell the transmission for 150€.

Money spent so far: 450€

Part one

Part two