elevation and engine preformance

Okay I never really stopped to think about this before: I live in the mountains in MT and it's some odd 9,000 feet above sea level I think. How much does elevation effect engine preformance?

it will affect you vehicle somewhat. fuel injected vehicles have a baro sensor which compensates for altitude differences. which helps somewhat, even though performance will be better at sea level. At higher altitudes the air molecules for a given amount of space is less, than at sea level, and what makes power is air/fuel, compression. This is more true for a N/A vehicle. Your volumetric efficiency is not as great as a turbo charged vehicle. but overall, you may only feel a slight difference I hope!

on a n/a car it may be quite a drastic drop in performance, on a turbo car it won't be as noticable.


Pm mexsir about it he went through the whole elevation thing with his car.
I think his best at sea level was a 15.3 and at 5000+ he was running a mid-high 16 I think. so thats over a seconds improvement just from dropping down to sealevel.

Every 1000 Ft is equal to a 3% power loss

alright, thanks for the info guys :)

I guess that's a pretty big difference. I shouldn't worry about it really though because I guess all the cars here would have the same "handicap" lol. But it does kinda annoy me to know that my car might be almost a second faster if I lived in another state...;;adds 1 more thing to the list of reasons to move out of Montana;;