MENUFiat 500X Tuning
"Thank you for reading my Fiat 500X tuning guide."
We review 500X tuning and provide tips on the optimum mods that work. Fiat 500Xs make awesome project cars and with the ultimate sports tuning mods you can certainly improve your driving opportunities.
The 500X is a good tuning project to carry out. Sit down first and research 500X tuning to spare yourself making the usual costly slip ups we typically come across.
Handling/Suspension upgrades
Many 500X owners uprate the handling of their cars with suspension kits as a priority, this will certainly increase your enjoyment of the car.
Fully adjustable suspension allows you to fine tune the handling of you 500X radically benefitting your drive.
We would go to a maximum drop of 30mm - 36 mm on most models. You risk handling compromises if you go lower than this.
Top end power should be your overall aim on the 500X with a nice fat peak torque band.
The best power gains come from larger engine sizes. The more you start with the bigger the return on investment so engine swaps are good value mods for small engined cars.
Engine tuning mods.
These mods uprated mods are usually installed by our members, decide how far you want to go before you get going.
Getting the right tuning modifications for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 competition upgrades just don't work well on the road difficult in stop start traffic.
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How to tune your car
- Improve the handling
Focus on Suspension improvements, such as coilovers and make sure the bushings are in good order and that the alignment is correct. Then focus on improving the brakes, with a big disk brake conversion kit and fast road brake pads.
- Remove restrictions
Focus on the intake and exhaust with filters being the common point of restriction in a tuned car. Intercoolers may also become restrictive on turbo engines so this may also need to be uprated.
- Burn more fuel & air
Increase the fuelling so it matches the air coming into the engine. The ratio is important so you need to improve the fuel pump and injectors, so the head mods, big valve conversions, fast road camshafts and forced induction upgrades extra supply of air is adequately met.
- Test and replace any weak parts
Weak areas are commonly the clutch, the turbocharger and pistons and crankshaft in a highly tuned engine. Makes sure these components will cope with your power aspirations.
- The Tune or Remap
A cars ECU controls the fuel, timing, spark and even the turbo in some cases, so to fully extract your gains you should remap the car last and this will fully release the power. Some cars are easy to map, and others require piggyback ECU's or aftermarket ECU's but this is the most vital step of your tuning project.
Modifying to Stage 1:
Suspension upgrade (drop 30-40mm), Lighter flywheel, Panel air filter, Remap, Alloy wheels, Sports exhaust.
Modifying to Stage 2:
Fast road cam, Power/Sport clutch, fuel pump upgrades, high flow fuel injector, Ported and polished head.
Modifying to Stage 3:
Sports gearbox, Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger), Engine balancing, Competition cam, Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves).
You really need to keep as much low end torque as possible and aim to get a wide power band across the rev range rather than a narrow top end power hike.
In this article we shall give a limited introduction to the best upgrades for your car, but we'd encourage you to spend some time on the site looking into the details of each type of performance mod.One of the most cost effective mechanical sports modifications you can do on your NASP engine is to fit a fast road cam .
The intake and exhaust durations play a large part in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car impossible to drive in traffic. You'd need to follow a cam upgrade with other mods and finish with a performance chip for the best performance gains.
You will need to ensure that the engine is not starved of fuel so will need to uprate the fuelling.
Frequently power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after motorsport kits are done can usually be traced to timing or fuel delivery issues.To get sufficient fuel you may need to increase the injectors on your engine.
A fuel pump will only deliver a finite amount of fuel, so you may need to uprate this if your injectors are demanding more fuel.
Intake and Exhaust Tuning.
Breathing mods are usually next up. Please note that WE DO NOT RECOMMEND INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car with over 30 percent more power and are finding that the standard air intake has become the bottleneck.
Induction kits can work well on turbo engines and larger engines (if supplied with a suitable cold air feed or air box), generally though we'd just recommend for 500X engines you should settle for a high performance panel air filter preferably made from cotton.
Sports exhausts generally help improve air flow through the engine but do not go too large or you may end up will reduce the flow rate. Stick to 1.5 to 2.5 inches for best results.
Airflow through the head can be dramatically increased with some professional polishing and ported. These should match and be setup to take into account any other engine mods. Your clutch can fail as the power goes up if it starts to slip and the standard clutches are only ever good for power gains of up to 45%. Fit a power clutch to avoid power leak through the transmission. The best mods in our opinion for your 500X are fast road camshaft, remap, induction and exhaust, suspensionRemaps offer significant power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful. However a remapped ECU on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods.
We've also come across some owners playing with twin charging conversions and making some seriously high power figures.
Adding forced induction will see impressive power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. It is generally easier to bolt on a supercharger than it is to install a turbo. Turbos provide boost in increasing proportion to increasing engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.
It is more straightforward to map a supercharger because the boost is proportional to engine speed on a linear curve. Alternatively you could perhaps fit water injection to control knock.
Alloy wheel upgrades.
The benefits of alloys include a lower unsprung weight and better brake cooling via the extra air flow they allow. Further improvements can be made to your cars handling with the addition of directional tread pattern tire. Large 500X alloy wheels can decrease performance. If you get big alloy wheels you will be changing your final drive ratio.
Because of this try to keep the overall rolling diameter of the wheel the standard factory sizes. In all cases we do not recommend going larger than 16 inches.
For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss 500X options in more detail with our 500X owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Fiat tuning articles to get a full grasp of the benefits and drawbacks of each modification.
Please help us improve these tips by sending us your feedback in the comments box below. We love to hear what our visitors have got up to and which mods work best for them on each model of car. Comments are used to improve the accuracy of these articles which are continually updated.
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