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Old 01-13-2012, 10:58 AM
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MTZL MTZL is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Mountain Zone Lancer (MTZL)
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Intakes
This is probably another huge mis-understood concept across both RA's and Evo's

The purpose of an intake is to feed the turbo air to compress. NOTHING more.

An intake does not help spool - the exhaust gases control the spool rate of the turbine and compressor wheels.

Turbo's that are not being fed enough air to match how much it needs to compress at higher rpms can face a restriction with the air intake. But with the case of the Ralliart, the stock turbo is VERY small. Since the flow of the turbo is very limited, there's no huge power gains to be had from an intake on the stock RA turbo.

An upgraded drop-in filter that helps flow a little more is enough for most RA owners. When you have upgraded the full exhaust, the stock RA turbo might run into some restriction by not getting fed enough air, but this margin is very small overall.

But this intake claims/shows to make XX amount of power?
Most intakes are showing gains off a stock car and stock tune. The factory tune's mixture of air and fuel (AFR) is so rich on fuel, that adding more air will always increase power.

The problem is that the main purpose of tuning involves optimizing fuel trims and AFR's. Buying an intake to change the AFR's is essentially doing the job of a proper tune - but with less control and less optimization than obviously directly changing fuel trims in a tune.

So you're back to the pure purpose of an intake - to feed air to the turbo. This is why most intakes actually don't show much power gains AFTER a tune compared to a drop-in filter. The turbo will not compress more air past it's capacity, no matter how much air is being fed to it.

And remember, the stock RA turbo is SMALL. You will run into restrictions on the turbo's flow rate much sooner than the intake's ability to feed it air.
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