Looking to make some upgrades for my 06 stang. I got about $1,100ish maybe more to blow on the car and need some help. First and foremost I wanna upgrade to the dual exhaust and I plan on buying the Pypes kit on AmericanMuscle, it sounds pretty great and looks good also. I'm deffinetly going to be buying that but was thinking of buying a CAI as well. Any recommendation on brands to buy for them? And also, how big is getting a tuner with the CAI? Is it a big deal? How much horse can I get out of a tune? With the dual exhaust, CAI and a tune how much more total hp do you think I can get out of my car? My car is auto btw.

 

I liked the pypes kit as well, I bought the shorty headers. I described to my local exhaust shop what the pypes kit was and had them custom make it for me and it sounds great and I saved around 400 dollars. Just a thought.

 

If you are looking for performance gains with a CAI, you NEED to purchase the SCT tuner along with it. I had the Airaid CAI, which does not require a tune and I only received minimal performance gains (5-7 HP). However, once I purchased the tuner and custom tunes from Brenspeed, I felt an immediate performance gain!!! I was stoked!! It drives like a totally different car!! They estimate (15 - 25 HP) gain, depending on the mods on the car. With that said, I highly recommend the CAI/Tuner combo, which can run anywhere from $550 - $700, depending on which CAI you choose. Popular CAI's I read here on the forum are the JLT and C&L. Good luck!!

 

@zimba - how did you save $400 when the kit online from AM is $475?

@kevinmalec - thanks for the help, def plan on grabbing a tuner now. also the 3 tunes I see street, performance and race, they all take the same gas or...? I read something that mislead me a little bit. And you can change the tunes on the fly and feel the difference?

Also, my close friend who lives near me also has a v6 stang and is buying a CAI. I was telling him about tuners and how important they seem to get. He brought up the idea of splitting a tuner to save some money, is that a good idea can we share one? The only downside of maybe not having it exactly when I want to make a tune? And what is the most common daily driver tune used? Street?

 

Cant share the tuner. The 'tune' is set specific to each PCM.
You CAN share the tuner device to read DTCs and clear them, but not for loading a tune on multiple vehicles.

 

Sorry, but you can't share tuners. Every tuner is locked to one vehicle at a time and can only be used on up to 5 vehicles. On top of that, the car it is locked to must be returned to the stock tune before being unlocked for somebody else.

About your gas question, when you order your tune you specify what octane you will be using in each tune. So you can order, for example, 87 Street, 89 Performance, 91 Race. Make sure to use the right octane on the right tune or you will cause knocking. If anything, make sure not to go down in octane. I.E., you can get away with using 91 on your 87 tune, but DO NOT use 87 on your 91 tune.

And yeah, as soon as you plug in your tuner and select a tune it only takes a few minutes to load in your car and you're ready to rock n roll!

 

So really if I'm using 87 street I can't change it on the fly to a 89 or 91 tune can I?

 

You can if you've changed the octane of gas you're running.

 

You won't be able to change tunes on the fly. You need the engine shut off and it takes about 2 minutes to change tunes. Do some more reading about what tunes to get. In general you wanna get a tune for the lowest and highest octanes in your area. The difference in tune types (street, performance, race) are where in the rpm range that they give you the most gains. A couple popular companies to get them from are AM/Bamachips and Brenspeed.

Use the search feature on this forum for a wealth of posts and threads regarding this topic, you'll learn a lot.

 

Really appreciate the good responses here. Thanks for all the help I will definetly read up on all the tuning stuff!