I need to up the power of my car but I don't want to supercharge it. What should I do?

Question

I have a 2000 honda prelude. I already have a cold air intake and just got headers and a custom exhaust put on. I don't have the money for turbos and supercharger.

Answer 1

you are already starting out with a good platform with the H series motor in your car and regardless of what you wanna do (unless you are skilled to do it yourself) performance will take money. From what i can see in your question, you wanna build a decently powered NA car.

here is the list you can follow

1) Port and polish head (local machine shop)
2) get bigger valves (Ferrara)
3) get aggressive camshaft (intake and exhaust costs around $300 total, HKS, )
4) adjustable cam gear ($170 avg, AEM, Unorthodox racing)
5) run a piggy back, or stand alone (cost of around 1000 or more eas>> Hondata, Megasquirt, Motec)
6) high compression pistons (set of 4 costs a min of $ 300, JE Pistos, Diamond, Scat)
7) Forged Al or Steel rods (set of 4 costs $400, Scat, Eagle)
8) Aftermarket Ignition (Coil packs, MSD)
9) Colder plugs to inhibit Knock
10) Adjustable Fuel pressure regulator (B&M, $80)

The list can go on and vary depending on your liking, but easy power adders are camshafts, high compression pistons and adjustable cam.

You can get a lot of power out of the car with small changes and appropriate settings to the ECU. But like i mentioned before, there is no specific price tag to be made for the things you are looking for since you are not that specific in your likings yet.

Answer 2

At this point, your best bet for significant power would be new cams and an ECU chip to match. Your current chip should be able to handle what you've already done, and any hp gains from a new chip would be minimal at best.

At the moment, you have access to more cold air, and can handle a greater volume of exhaust, but the engine still can't actually draw more air in - the valves aren't open long enough. New cams, however, will allow the engine to make full use of that new intake and exhaust - and you can get a lot of hp this way. (I used to drive a classic Mini - 1100cc motor and 40 hp. Cam, carbs and exhaust system got me up to 70 hp - a 75% increase. You probably won't see this size increase, since Honda engines are already well designed, but it can be quite significant.

Good luck!

Answer 3

if it was me, I'd trade it in for a Mustang GT. But seriously, You can bore the cylinders 0.30 over, add a more aggressive cam, there are all sorts of power adder,but there's only so much air and fuel you can compress in the combustion chamber especially on a 4 cyl. It would take maybe $55,000 to make a 4 cyl. engine produce over 350 hp. It's been done, but like they say, if money's no limit, anything is possible.

Answer 4

Change the intake manifold to either a Skunk2 intake manifold or individual throttle bodies. Also look at high compression pistons and a port and polish head with new valvetrain. That would be really good for a high rpm screamer.

Answer 5

bigger fuel injectors, chips, lighten the car as much as possible, best bet though is save and spend 3-5 grand on a really good turbo...thats about average the supra in fast and the furious spent over 7 g's on the turbo alone

Answer 6

have the ecm reprogrammed, all cars are deprogrammed so that they fit a vast amount of drivers, there is lots of hidden power that an expert with a power programmer can extract

Answer 7

a racing cam, nitrous,new gear drive are some ways to make your car go faster but if you really want a car with a lot of power just get a chevy

Answer 8

change the ECU...lots of chips in the market to change the engine management...

port and polish...

blueprinting ( if done right )can up your power by 10%...

lighten the car...

and most cmmon mistake is to up engine power without upgrading brakes... so get bigger disc... and beef up suspension to handle increase power load...

Answer 9

on a car that new you could probably do some "chip tuning"