ghunt

I was at Walmart last week waiting on an appointment for the optometrist, so I went to the magazine rack. There was a magazine on there called "1979-2013 Mustang Performance" or something like that (to be honest, it looked like one of those "special issue" type mags that 5.0 Mustang or MM&FF puts out).

Anyway they had a section of the magazine where they tested bolt-ons for every generation of Mustangs from Foxes up through the new 5.0's, and I got a chance to flip through it and was very confused.

In the 05-10 (3V 4.6) part of the story they started with somebody's stock GT. They then did bolt-ons in this order: No-tune K&N CAI, throttle body, 3"(!) off road X pipe, Dynomax Race Bullet 3" cat-back, and finally a tune.

So I'm looking through the dyno charts for the car. Supposedly, they are saying they got at most 5 hp with the no-tune CAI, basically nothing from the throttle body, 14 hp from the X pipe, a couple hp from the cat back, and then about 10 hp from the tune for a total of 20-something hp from all that stuff. That doesn't even add up, I don't know how they got 14 hp from removing the cats yet only 10 hp from a tune, unless the tune was pretty conservative due to them using a no-tune CAI?

They also did a New-Edge GT which they did similar mods to and they claimed a 25 hp gain on it too, and even on the new 5.0 I think their average hp gain was also only around 25-30 hp.

The whole thing was just very odd. I was gonna buy the mag just to read it more but the damn thing was $6 and I really didn't want to spend that much.

Stang-aholic

thats not tooo out of the ordinary. magazines have plenty of articles that show you can just "bolt-on big power gains" but without a tune, much of their gains were probably negligible. It may have spun the dyno faster with exhaust, and some CAIs can be run w/o a tune, but they are not nearly as efficient as those requiring a tune. With all those mods and a tune, you should see ~25hp or more depending on brands and who did the tune (canned vs dyno)

also a CAI of any brand will allow more air IN, but coupled with a 3" exhaust, that lets a whole lotta air OUT so the X pipe and cat removal claim can be truthful. Then the tune (probably canned in this case) doesn't have much else to add except more fuel, small amount of timing, etc. when the system to start with is already pretty free flowing.