" It's a smarter STI."
Wheels Magazine
|
PETER LUXON > He drives hard, loves cars, and knows his turbos. “I think the combined knowledge about turbos and engines of the five key players here is about 130 years,” says APS head Peter Luxon. “It’s not like we’ve just opened our doors!” Luxon first became involved with turbocharging when the industry was in its infancy, dealing with cars like HZ Holden Premiers and XC Ford Falcons. “Back in those days when you were young and silly, if a bloke came in and wanted twin turbos on his V8, we were silly enough to do it! I don’t think we made any money on it, but we certainly learnt a lot.” “There was a bit of a fuel scare in the early ‘80s and the performance industry dried up. But the RV industry was becoming really popular so we started doing turbo kits for four-wheel drives.” The 4WD market was Luxon’s bread and butter until the new generation of Japanese performance cars like the Mitsubishi Lancer GSR and Subaru WRX came along in the early ‘90s. “We could see the performance car market was starting to come back strong, so we decided to investigate the car market again. One of the things we looked at was the VR V8 Commodore; we wanted to twin-turbo that but it wasn’t possible. Instead, we engineered a centrifugal supercharger kit.” Based in Bayswater in Melbourne, APS has plenty of international presence, thanks largely to its 4WD turbo packages. “We’ve built a number of high-horsepower LandCruisers and the like for Middle East customers. One was a five-speed that ran a 12.9 with 485 kW (650 hp). We’ve also done kits for Corvette, Camaro and Mustang, and not too far down the track we’re doing a kit for the export (US) Monaro. It’s early days at the moment, but we’ve done basic prototyping on a Middle East LHD car. Our aim is to have a fully productionised, ready-to-go package at the launch of that vehicle.” “We want our twin-turbo Chev stuff to not just be quicker, but to annihilate those yanks!”
|
