ManiacLachy wrote:It's like you haven't even been listening to us telling you the benefits of the exhaust!
It definitely makes a difference to power delivery, maybe not the max HP, but certainly in spool giving you more power earlier, and Dann's sounds really nice.
I'm glad it's all going nicely on the car, you've woken up the power to a good comfortable level and managed to avoid many of the headaches that can occur. Maybe not all the power that you'd get with a standalone but most of it, and a standalone costs more and can be much more difficult while fine tuning. I think for a fun street car you've hit the perfect balance.
Now, about those wheels
LOL - ManiacLachy has "seen the light" regarding 15" rims on the MSM and is now preaching the word.
Regarding the exhaust:
When I was shopping around for an SE/MSM, I drove a couple and wasn't impressed at all. Coming from a Mitsubishi Starion, I had very definite ideas on what a turbocharged car should feel like and the stock SE/MSM was very underwhelming, you almost couldn't even feel the car boosting (supposedly it was tuned to feel like a small V6 so power delivery was meant to be smooth, no adrenalin boost rush intended).
The third car I test-drove, Gina, had the FM MSM downpipe and felt quite different to the previous two cars - dyno graphs of the FM downpipe vs the OEM downpipe show that boost comes on a lot earlier which is why the car felt different/better.
FM's downpipe still has the same 2" choke point at the turbo end as the OEM one so it still left a lot of room for improvement - FM never bothered to address this issue and kept flogging their half-arsed downpipe (it's better than the OEM one, but not as good as it should have been if they eliminated that choke point).
I subsequently upgraded the rest of the exhaust to the FM 2.5" system and didn't really feel any difference in power but it did sound good.
The dyno reported an additional 10 rwkw which is supposedly the minimum that most people can detect with their "butt dyno" so no surprise that I wasn't really sure if it had achieved anything after the initial drive.
Dann's exhaust will bring boost on much earlier than stock (power comes on earlier) and flows better too so should be good for at LEAST an additional 12rwkw.
This is a great time to be modding an NA/NB, we now have a lot of tried-and-trusted modz that users are vouching for so when you spend your $$$, you know that it's worth it.