A Saab is probably not what comes to mind when you think of easily tunable, high horsepower cars. But the older Saab cars are one of the cheapest turbo cars to mod and can make reliable, silly horsepower on a $5k or less budget. Look for cars equipped with the B204 and B234 engines (2nd generation Saab 900 / 9-3 and 9000) or cars equipped with the B205 and B235 engines (Saab 9-5).
Check out our Saab 9-3 (NG900) big turbo project car with a custom top mount set up made from McMaster Carr Schedule 40 Weld Els and using a big Precision turbo. Total spend for the car and upgrades – producing over 400whp under boost – were under $5k:
Let’s look at what makes Saabs so good as well as some things to be aware of:
Saab Pros:
- Iron block motors: can handle silly horsepower levels in stock form – pistons and rods are the weak link
- Trionic Engine Management: Trionic 5 (T5) engines – B204 and B234 – have a red direct ignition casing on top of the motor and Trionic 7 (T7) engines -B205 and B235 – have a black casings. The Trionic maps are essentially “open source”: with some small wiring mods to install a BDM interface, you can access and tune the ECU using open source software on any laptop. Our hillclimb Saab 9-3 was street tuned to 28psi and 400whp for a fraction of the cost of other tuning software.
- Direct Ignition and Knock Detection: These motors were designed to handle boost from the ground up, and the engine management offers some very advanced knock detection capability. The Direct ignition system can “listen” for knock through the spark plugs, and knock maps can be tuned to pull timing and dump fuel.
- Easy to Work On: The turbo is mounted in the front – closest to the radiator – making it relatively simple to pull the bumper and work on wastegate, oil / water lines, and even replacing turbos / manifolds.
- Cheap Parts: So let’s say you want to throw a big turbo on the car: a Holset HX35 or HX30 is a very reliable turbo and works great – they can be found for $200. Now you need a bigger T3 flange to mount your new turbo (the stock manifold is a T25 flange), simple – the first generation Saab 900 manifold has a T3 flange and it bolts right up to the B204, B234, B205, and B235 motors. You can find a used manifold for $50. We custom made a downpipe by purchasing an exhaust flange and some exhaust piping (drove with an open downpipe to the nearest exhaust shop to weld it to the rest of the exhaust), and cut our own intercooler piping from a cheap aluminum piping kit. See where this is going?
Saab Cons:
- Handling: The chassis on the 900 and 9-3 cars is a noodle, the dash is probably more rigid than the chassis. It’s so bad that if you jack the car up on one corner, the front door will scrape on the body panel when closing – and it may not even close properly. Yea… that bad. You’ll have to add about a hundred pounds of bracing if you want the suspension to do its job.
- Sludge and DIC Issues: If you get one of the B205 or B235 cars (9-3 Viggen or Saab 9-5 Aero), you’ll need to watch out for an oil sludge issue caused by a faulty PCV system. There’s a replacement kit for the PCV system, just make sure it was installed. Additionally, the awesome direct ignition cartridge (mentioned above) can fail due to excessive heat. There are water-cooled microprocessors in the DIC which are prone to failure – look for cars with fresher DICs or you’ll learn to hunt for a spare just to have on-hand. Saab also issued a recall for them, so check if it has a post-recall DIC.
- Looks: Some people think they’re plain ugly, but there’s something unique and awesome about the oldschool Scandinavian styling. You be the judge…
Even with the stock turbo, our 9-5 Aero with a bigger downpipe and tune outran an Aston Martin V8 Vantage with 2 passengers in the car. If you don’t believe us, check out what Top Gear had to say about the 9-5 Aero in stock form: