“It’s pretty easy these days to make a lot of power. The trick is managing that power, getting it to the ground and making it work for you,” says Marty Staggs of Turbosmart. “Racers these days have sensors on everything, but one of the areas that has always been tricky has been the wastegate.”

Now, thanks to Turbosmart’s new wastegate valve position sensor, turbo-powered racers will be able to not just be able to see if the wastegate is open or not, but how much it’s open. “It operates with a 0-5-volt signal that is very easy for a tuner to scale,” Staggs says. “It will interface with any 0-5-volt gauge or datalogging system on the market.”

Previously, racers could only monitor whether the CO2 solenoid was open or closed, or if they could hear the wastegate opening.

“Things happen in racecars, and if you come back and look at your data and see that your boost is down, you can then make a guess that something went wrong with the wastegate, but all you really knew was if the CO2 activated it or not,” says Staggs.

“This position sensor gives you the actual feedback of what the wastegate is doing. You can look at the data and can say, ‘At this point, this is the actual position of the valve.’”

An all-new sensor design, the Turbosmart Wastegate Valve Position Sensor hasn’t been adapted from another sensor, and features a rare-Earth magnet in the sensor cap. The modular design means that it can be retrofitted to previous models of Turbosmart wastegates, and going forward, will be offered as an option on its wastegate lineup. Racers with turbocharged engines can now monitor exactly what’s happening in their exhaust system, diagnose issues, and ensure performance is delivered as required.