P3Cars have been making some cool, non-intrusive, vent gauges for a while now. But Turner Motorsport gets their own exclusive one for some customers. Read on…
Information. It’s basically at our fingertips 24/7, isn’t it? You have Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. on pretty much any device you pick up these days. In our car this is all getting even more crazy, because navigation systems have technology that most customers can’t process even after a week’s worth of using.
So what happened when you were a car guy and you needed information about your car right then and there while you were driving? Well, you either had to rely on the information your gauge cluster, and now navigation system, tells you. But there was a lot of information missing, sadly.
P3Cars had a solution for BMW nuts who wanted things like: Intake Air Temperature, Exhaust Gas Temp, Coolant Temp, Boost/Vacuum for the forced induction crowd, Ignition Timing, Uncorrected Speed, etc. BMWs, for some odd reason, have a speedometer that only tells you part of a story. In many Bimmers, if you’re traveling at 80 mph, you really are only going 78. Why BMW do this, I have no idea, even though they’ve tried to explain to me. So having things like ‘uncorrected speed’ while driving can be beneficial, especially on the track. The best part? all this information was fed to you directly via your OB port and a gauge that slides right into your driver’s side air vent.
Now I’ve used the P3Cars vent gauge in the Turner Motorsport 335i project car I drove last year, and it definitely showed some cool information. But Turner Motorsport weren’t happy with just having a vent gauge that was non-intrusive that displayed all the vital information you needed. No, they worked with P3Cars to go a step further for you…
As an exclusive product from Turner Motorsport, the P3Cars vent gauge will now show you 0-60 and 0-100 times, as well as 60-0 and 100-0 braking times. This information, while fun to show off, is actually rather informative to car guys trying to set their cars up for the drag strip, street circuits, or just a little weekend fun. Before this you had to either rely on a potentially dangerous app on your smartphone, or go buy a VBox that looked like an ancient radar detector at the bottom of your windshield.
A great reason to buy the P3Cars vent gauge for your forced induction BMW:
In addition to the data captured from the OBD plug, the P3Cars kit comes with three universal analog inputs. This can allow you to tap into chargepipes for actual boost pressure or reading boost on aftermarket supercharger kits (works great on boosted M3s!). On turbo engines you can monitor methanol injection by tapping into your meth kit. Other P3Cars features are a color matched display and automatic dimming with your other gauges. It can be configured to display either English and Metric units. P3 gauges are engineered specific for each chassis so a basic setup is required upon first install to match the gauge electronics with your car and to ensure it is communicating correctly.
Installation is very simple and a breeze. Just pull the air vent out closest to your driver door (gently, people. these are plastic and can break), swap the P3Cars/Turner Motorsport vent gauge in, and plug the cables into the OBD port that’s near your hood release. Voila! Okay, so it’s a tiny bit more involved then the way I said it, but it’s still really easy. You can read the instructions here. N54 motor’d BMWs need a vacuum line running to the chargepipe to read boost, so those guys will have a little more work that isn’t horribly difficult.
You can read more on how to buy the P3Cars kit from Turner Motorsport at the bottom of this page.
[Source: Turner Motorsport, P3Cars]
