[Porsche-O-Phile]

Danno blew his engine because Anderson Racing screwed up the assembly - it ended up being a total POS, poorly put together - block cracked from the bore-out. Unfortunately, Danno took JA at his word that the engine was built strong and basically it wasn't. Anderson screwed it up although Danno (I suppose) was partly culpable for not double-checking everything. Send him a mail; I'm sure he'll be able to tell you the whole sordid story of it.

Suffice to say though, the n/a and turbo engines are virtually the same; the only major difference is the pistons & the compression ratio. The bottom ends (even of the n/a engines) are strong enough to withstand 600-700 h.p. AFIK so there's no problem there. The only real issue is the c/r since the n/a engines typically use 9.5:1 or 9.6:1 and the turbos use 8.0:1. The way around this (leaving the n/a pistons and c/r in place) is to run lower boost and/or dialed back timing - this tends to preserve bottom end torque at the expense of a bit of available higher-RPM boosted power (since there's less total boost being used). If you want, just get a 951 short block and either transplant it in or swap the pistons over into the car to give it 8.0:1 c/r and you should be fine boost-wise also. It's basically a personal preference choice.

Danno's current engine is an '86 n/a with a slightly shaved head that I believe puts him in the neighborhood of 10:1 c/r. He's had no problem with 12 psi boost and just recently started running 15 psi boost with 1 degree of retard on the timing. Works fine.