ADAM ROGASH

MPW Performance is the shop behind some of Victoria’s most bad-arse street cars, and plenty of mega-horsepower rides have graced its dyno over the years. Adam ran Horsepower Heroes at Summernats 30, and his own car, an HSV Clubsport by the name of NOSHOW, is a genuine seven-second streeter that’s good for over 1200hp at the tyres. All that makes him well-placed to weigh in on the relative merits of hub and roller dynos.

“We run a brand new, top-of-the-line Mainline twin retarder-roller dyno that’s rated to 2400hp. It’s been great; we haven’t had any dramas with any cars at the shop or Summernats, and a lot of that comes down to how you strap the cars.

“We went for a roller dyno because on top of the bigger cars like NOSHOW and Luke Foley’s VH, we also do a lot of lowerpowered stuff in the 200-300rwkw range. In my experience, hub dynos read between five and 15 per cent higher than roller dynos, and the last thing we want in the industry is for the shop to develop a reputation of having a happy dyno.

“For example, I had a car in the dyno comp at Summernats that had come straight off a hub dyno where it made 1050hp, but on my roller dyno it only made 750-800hp. I’d rather that my dyno reads conservatively and the cars run great numbers at the track.

“If a 3200lb car comes off my dyno making 650rwkw, we know it’s going into the eights. If it makes 550rwkw, it’ll run low nines. If a 3800lb car like NOSHOW makes 1270hp, we know it’ll dip into the sevens. When a car makes a number on our dyno, it will show at the track every time. On a hub dyno you don’t have the power loss through the wheels and tyres, but at the track, all those forces are in action.

“For our big stuff, I can definitely see the advantage in a hub dyno because it’s easier from a tuning perspective, but in saying that, we generally get everything to a certain point and then finish up the tune at the track anyway, because of the ram air effect, different pressures and all the other variables. That’s why we datalog everything.

“But you can’t go past hub dynos for tuning big-power cars. It’s so much easier on the car and the person in it. On a roller dyno it can be a bit of a wild ride! I’d favour a hub dyno for tuning a dedicated race car or a street car with more than 1000hp at the tyres. It’s horses for courses, really.”