Ever since I was old enough to drive... I was tweaking my cars. To that point, I always speculated about the horsepower gains I would receive from putting in a K&N intake system into a car. To my logic, I took the factory horsepower rating and added in the "K&N" claims (such as 12+hp) to the power at the crank and claim that's how much my car was "approximately making". I also knew that the horsepower/torque to the wheels is vastly different than crank and all-wheel-drive systems took away 20-30% away from the wheels.
After visiting
http://www.latemodelthrottle.com in Waukesha, Wisconsin... I had a serious eye opener. See the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHYvOFn6aUsTo recap my findings:
*I had 3 runs without the intake and 3 runs with the new intake.[/li][/list]
* My car was consistently making a maximum of ~316 WHP and ~328TQ.
*After installing the K&N Intake system, I found that my car made only about +2 maximum WHP. It lost (yes, LOST) approximately 4 WTQ.
*After digging deeper into the DYNO results, I noticed that while maximum horsepower was basically unchanged -- the power held out for LONGER in the RPM band. This means that while I hit maximum horsepower at 5000RPM, the rate at which I lost horsepower between 5000 and 6000 RPM was slower.
*At 5820RPM, I had +28WHP and +28WTQ MORE than the stock baseline!
*Per the end of the video, I can now have turbo spool and blow off sounds, which makes that inner 16 year old kid gitty.
So to this point, I learned a very valuable lesson. Just because you throw on an intake, it doesn't mean your maximum horsepower and torque goes up. It means that there is more capacity for air to be sucked into the engine during the higher demand of higher RPMs.
My next experiment or theory: I expect that maximum WHP and WTQ will go UP after downpipes, 3 bar sensor, 170 degree thermostat, exhaust, and tune. (ok, this is a given). Moreover, I expect the rate at which the horsepower is lost in the higher RPMs will be less, due to there being less restriction on the backend of the car.
Feel free to subscribe to the forum and youtube channel feed to keep up with the story over the next month as I get the remaining tunes.