Recommendations

I feel like bad asking all these questions, and not giving anything back. This is my first car, and though I know and understand the basics of an engine, and I know enough to diagnose my car and on occasion fix it, I still don’t know A LOT. Actual having a car to work on is awesome.

For my stange (2002 v6 3.8L), which I use and race on back roads and which I am trying to slowly mod for more street racing, what would you recommend for the fallowing.

Air intake

ECU

Exhaust upgrades (Headers and such) and ideally something to make other car alarms go off when I rev the engine. Is this under exhaust or are there other ways to do that? If so, suggestions for such a product?



how about fuil injection\forced injection? (i know this gets pretty expensive)

Suspension and chassis. Should I even mess with these?

I don’t know the brands to get, and I don’t really know what to get. Could you help me out? give me a link to a product? Keep in mind, my budget isn’t huge. I don’t want to put 100k nor even 20k into the car. I’ll do that when I got a new car.

Thanks

Suspension upgrades are a great way to make a car feel faster. Not having to slow down as much for a turn is really a key to maintaining speed instead of having to build it.

On the engine side, start with intake and exhaust. You probably won't set off car alarms with a V6, and be careful which one you choose; a V6 sometimes sounds like poop with a really open exhaust.

If I had it, I'd do cold air intake, headers and exhaust, and lowering springs with Bilstein shocks. Consider better tires and ECU programming, but all of the engine mods together will probably get you 20hp max, so weigh the cost versus the benefit. If you're serious about performance, don't go nuts with 20" rims. 16 or 17 is about max on that car before you start going too far and losing handling

Keep close tabs on cost as well... it won't take long to spend as much as it would be to upgrade to a v8 stang.

do you have any recommendations for an air intake? brand\product?

yeah, i only plan on having this car for 2years at max.

Honestly, I'd go with cheapest. The stock airbox isn't that restrictive and anything aftermarket you put on there will be more than adequate. I would however make sure its a smog-legal intake. It might make a bit of difference if you end up selling it to a state that requires a smog-legal part.

Check with other mustang owners to see what cheap kits work well. Then hit Ebay and start bidding on the cheap ones :) The most desirable ones are the new oil-free washable filters.

sweet, cheap, that's music to my ears! ;-P

great, although i'm not sure what smog-legal is, i'll make sure i got it.

thanks again.

Smog-legal means that the part will pass smog tests in states or areas that do the test. There are two main things they look for... the sniffer (what comes out the tailpipe) and smog-legal bolt-on parts. The CARB (california air resources board) tests parts at the request (and wallet) of the manufacturers to make sure it doesn't raise emissions. So, even if your car passes the sniffer test, if there isn't a CARB EO (executive order) number on the part it won't pass. I had built a home-brew intake for my car that I'm sure didn't affect emissions a bit, but it would have failed because its wasn't tested and given an EO number.

Since 90% of the intakes out there don't raise emissions, most of the manufacturers have paid to get a CARB EO number for their part. It won't be tough to find one.

than i guess it would be a good idea for me to go ahead and look up the NC smog state laws.

does any1 know off hand if LED's are legal in NC? and what about VA?

As long as they are DOT-legal lights, and installed according to the law, they're legal. Check your state's laws, but you obviously can't put 10 headlights on a car, and taillights have to be a certain color, but its pretty straight forward. Even if they're not DOT-legal, as long as you stick with the spirit of the law you probably won't get a ticket.