Its time to breathe new life into your old ride and fall in love with it again with these simple mods. If you want to remain tasteful while improving your car’s performance factor there are numerous changes you can make to your car without paying through the nose. Here are some of the most popular ways to make your ride better:
Cold Air Intake – A cold air intake is the least expensive way to improve the power and efficiency of your car. It replaces your car’s standard air box and filter with a cone-shaped, long-life filter and an aluminium or plastic intake tube. All this provides more air to your engine, boosting the horsepower and fuel efficiency.
Free Flow Exhaust and Headers – Bringing more air into your engine increases performance, but adding new headers and a better-flowing exhaust system allows waste gases to exit with greater ease, boosting your car’s performance even more. A modern car’s muffler and catalytic converter exists to reduce noise and harmful emissions, but they also increase a car’s back pressure and restrict the car’s ability to get waste gases out of the engine, thereby wasting power. Exhaust gas coming from the cylinder have to push all the other exhaust through the manifold pipes and silencers; this is what’s known as back pressure. Too much back pressure doesn’t just diminish a car’s available power but also raises engine temperatures and makes the engine work harder, reducing fuel economy. Installing a new exhaust manifold with equal-length pipes and bigger pipe sections along with a straight through rear muffler provides a smooth flow to the exhaust gases, reducing back pressure thus adding to your car’s and giving it a sporty sound too.
ECU Remapping: An ECU does the job of making sure everything is running smoothly in your car’s engine. It uses actuators and sensors to adjust air-fuel ratio, ignition timing and idle speed etc. to keep the engine running smoothly. Reprogramming the ECU or chipping alters the mapping parameters of the engine within safe limits to increase performance of the engine. There are various reputed brands tuning software’s that can plug into your car’s obd port to re-flash the ECU’s built-in software using a re-programmed map so as to extract more performance from your car’s engine. All this electronic wizardry along with a Cold Air Intake and a Free Flow Exhaust can give your car tremendous horsepower gains sometimes up to 20-30 % more in terms of power. Thus, ECU remapping remains an all-time favorite with car enthusiasts.
Upgrading your Tyres and Alloys – You can have all the power in the world under the hood, but without proper traction it’s of no use. Having a good set of tires can make all the difference in how your car puts power to the road and handles sharp curves. A good branded tyre with a higher rating and a good tread pattern will increase traction and reduce aquaplaning thus transforming how your car rides in different road conditions. Also a light weight alloy wheel will help you reduce weight, adding stiffness and increasing the fuel average of your vehicle. Not to mention adding the style quotient to your ride.
Sports Suspension Kit- Having added some power to your car, it may be time to consider switching over to a sports suspension setup a there’s no point in increasing the power to your car if you can’t put that power down on the road and handle that power in the twisty bits. Coil springs support the weight of the vehicle and allow the body to move up and down while the shocks control the springs’ oscillations. A sports set up like the coilovers combines both functions in one component that also allows you to fine tune the suspension as per your liking i.e. you can adjust the vehicles height as per your liking and tune the suspension comfort level also with the damper adjustments. Another popular option get the stance of your car right are lowering springs which can be used in conjunction with the existing dampers. All these mods not only reduce the wheel & tyre gap but also help the car drive faster through corners by providing better grip and stability.
Replacing your Spark Plugs – Normally spark plugs don’t seem very exciting, but these small metal and porcelain items can work wonders for your car if you find the right ones by providing a clean spark and good burn. The spark emitted by the plug serves a singular and vital purpose: to ignite the gas and air mixture in your car’s cylinder walls to generate power. A clean, hot spark ignites fuel and air better, and making sure you get the right plugs and change them regularly is key; these little bad boys get hot and can corrode over time. Copper is the best conductor of current but doesn’t last as long as platinum and iridium. So for the best of both the worlds – great conductivity and long life aim for Iridium plugs only. Also while you are at it, looking into high performance spark plug wires too which will help the constant flow of current even under extreme conditions. After all upgrading everything else is useless if the electricals fail.
