Vanderbijlpark, Gauteng - No sooner had Toyota given its long-running 70 Series Land Cruiser workhorse a serious beef injection with a new V8 turbodiesel than the aftermarket began looking at ways to improve it
The 4.5-litre, 32-valve, common-rail, direct-injection oil-burner is no slouch out of the box, rated as it is for 151kW at 3400 revs and a monumental 430Nm from 1200-3200rpm, but Toyota specialist Steve's Auto Clinic reckoned there was room for significant improvement without major surgery.
So they borrowed a low-mileage Land Cruiser 76 Station Wagon from a local dealer and performance-tested it to establish a baseline.
The new engine, impressively, did exactly what it said on the tin - 151kW and 430Nm - but the 76 weighs more than two tons and real-world performance was, to put it politely, leisurely.
The 0-100km/h sprint required 15 seconds and it took a full 23 seconds to reach the national speed limit; in-gear acceleration wasn't much better, either.
FIRST, DO NO HARM
Back in the workshop, they opted not to make any irrevocable changes; first they fitted a UniChip U-Connect plug-and-play piggyback - a R6950 (including VAT and fitting) stand-alone module that comes with its own wiring harness, plugs straight into the standard Toyota ECU and can simply be unplugged if necessary.
That gave impressive gains, but still sounded like a rhinoceros with sinusitis, so they bolted on a 76mm De Graaf stainless-steel performance exhaust system - another R6950 installed - to liberate some V8 rumble, as well as a whole bunch more voomah.
Together, they not only increased peak power by about 25 percent, but also significantly improved in-gear acceleration. The 0-100km/h sprint time was down three seconds to 12 seconds, 120km/h came up six seconds quicker at only 18 seconds and overtaking from 80-120km/h - which originally needed 13.43 seconds - now takes less than 10, making towing vastly less stressful.