How To (Legally) Get More Oomph From Your Car

We live in a country that heavily regulates what we can do to our own vehicles. The LTA gets really cranky should you decide to strap power adders onto your car. If caught, you risk stiff penalties, and to our best knowledge, only one model, the Lexus IS of the mid 2000s, actually got LTA’s approval for an aftermarket forced induction kit. Can you actually squeeze a little more go out of your car, but without breaking some truly puzzling laws and running the risk of an inspection failure?

Turns out, you can. Here are 5 ways to go a little more quickly in your existing ride!

An engine progressively gets clogged up with carbon build-up and with sludge. Power losses can be significant after several years, so the most effective way, both in terms of actual power output and economically speaking, to get a little more go from your vehicle, is to recover some of that power losses.

A thorough service can do wonders. Consider changing all the fluids in your vehicle, as well as opting for a quality engine flush. These are chemicals designed to dissolve deposits, which are then flushed out with an engine oil change. Pair this flush with fresh spark plugs and a new air filter - spark plugs get weaker as they age, and old filters may be clogged, both contributing to power losses. An aftermarket air intake system may be fitted if you’re after that sweet intake noise, but they have the potential to sap power, as proven by the mightycarmods guys!

More oomph can sometimes mean better optimisation of the power you already have. It isn’t always about chasing bigger power figures - getting rid of weight can also positively impact performance as well!

A good starting point is to declutter your car, ditching anything in your boot that you don’t use all that often. A step further would be to also remove your spare, replacing it with a lightweight and compact tyre repair kit (We live in Singapore, and you really don’t have to drive all that far to find a tyre repair shop). If however, you want to really get serious about weight reduction, you can replace entire body panels with composite replacements (We recommend you keep your doors stock though - they have crash structures built into them, which is something composite replacements lack) that will net you some serious losses. Lighter alloys will most definitely help in your quest for more go too!

Uprated brakes and tyres translate into better stopping power and higher grip levels. This means you can stay on the throttle for longer, applying the brakes far later than you can stock. You gain performance by simply being on the throttle for fractionally longer, as you need a greatly reduced distance to amply slow the car down for the corner ahead due to the superior clamping force.
Grippier tyres will further afford you the luxury of maximising the efficacy of your new braking setup. As they’re made of a stickier rubber compound, they offer you the grip needed to carry more speed through a corner, and can take more repeated abuse as compared to cheaper and lower-end tyres.

Reputable tuning shops are able to write new pieces of software to allow your engine and chassis to operate at parameters that the factory didn’t originally design the car for. Reflashing often involves alterations to timing, air-fuel mixtures, as well as removing or increasing the upper limits of the power output restrictions put in place by the factory for engine protection purposes.

They often also unlock other features, such as on-the-fly adjustable maps (a la a racing car!), diagnostics and other data-logging features. You’ll really only see gains on a car with forced induction with this method. These are often fully reversible, so should you want to take your car back to the main dealer for warranty purposes, you can actually get everything reset to default.

Probably the most labour and cost intensive way to get more oomph from your vehicle, but this is definitely the most reliable and effective way to go faster. Getting familiar with the quirks of your car is be a good place to start. Spirited drives on quiet roads will allow you to experience the car properly in motion, and some trackdays will also allow you to literally get to grips with pushing your car to its limits, albeit in a safe and controlled environment. You’ll chew through tyres and brakes and that cost can add up after a bit.

You can sharpen your driving skills through other means as well. Karting, for example, is a brilliant way to experience driving on the limit, at a reduced expense compared to tracking your daily. With no safety net built into the karts (no traction control, no ABS), you’ll have to master jumping on the anchors just enough to not induce a locking of the rear axle, and to effectively slow down. You’ll also have to figure out how to drive the kart in a way that you carry maximum momentum throughout the entire lap, and not bogging down through the use of dodgy lines.

If even karting is too expensive in the long run for you, another alternative is through investing in a simulator set-up. The upfront costs for this can be much higher than with either of the previous methods, but as you don’t have to pay for each individual session or for consumables like either of the previous methods, you’ll actually spend less in the long run. Quality wheel and pedal sets, as well as proper simulators, can really help you gain the necessary motor skills needed to push a car hard in real life as well. Many real life racing drivers use simulators for training purposes, and some of them have transitioned from simulators to real-life racing with some impressive finishes. Many sim drifters have also transitioned to drifting in real-life, saying that the skills and muscle memory gained in the virtual world translates across very nicely indeed.

There are definitely cheaper ways to get more go from your vehicle. Elsewhere in the world, swapping larger engines into smaller cars has been the go-to for cheap and reliable go-fast modifications. Turbochargers and superchargers have been employed in many applications overseas as well, and with some supporting mods, these modified setups can push out power at levels the factory engineers could really only dream of, especially with the equipment fitted as stock to the cars.

We live in a country with a unique set of regulations that govern what we can and can’t do with our cars. Extracting more oomph therefore, is a little trickier. Most of the modifications here shouldn’t actually cost you all that much, but can really make a huge difference. We believe that sharpening one’s driving skill should still be the de facto way to extract more go from a car. Leaving your car stock means longevity when you aren’t caning it around a track, and the improved car handling skills will be transferable, regardless of the vehicle you are in!

Credits: Jek Ray Low