OK.... LOL.... I'll bite.





You don't need to spend an absolute fortune or go FA to get 200 horses.

The car in the graph above still has a catalytic converter and still gets 30 miles per gallon.

The header, converter and cat back are all from SMS Products. The exhaust is fairly quiet, but it is louder than stock so you need to be careful if you like to show off and/or your locality has one of those laws that forbid non-stock-like exhausts. Obviously, you could get 3-5 more horsepower by dropping the catalytic converter and retuning the ECU.

The ECU is the cheapest Hondata available (S100 P28), and was tuned by Steve Sakai (link in signature). Sakai is rapidly getting attention as one of the best tuners on the East Coast, and there's a group in British Columbia and California talking about paying to bring him to the West Coast to do some tuning for them.

My VTEC is set very low, but you can tell from the torque band that it obviously works. The idea was to produce a track car that I could use without getting caught off the cam.

The intake is a Comptech Icebox. If you wanted to get more horsepower to show up on the dyno, a cheap filter on a stick will show up better on the dyno...but it might not give you the most on the track, and you might not have the throttle response you want.

Fuel rail is stock, injectors are stock, although the injectors were checked for flow. Part of tuning a Hondata will usually involve buying a fuel pressure gauge and an adjustable fuel pressure regulator, but these items are relatively cheap.

Cams are stock. Valve lash is stock. Cam gears were changed to Skunk2 adjustables and it was part of the ECU tuning to improve the cam timing slightly.

Although the car has 71,000 miles on it, the bottom end tested as quite healthy, so Dave (SMSP) and Steve (SG-T) elected not to even think about CTR pistons or anything like that.

What they did instead was bump the compression about 0.50 by milling the cylinder head, and some mild porting and polishing was done at the same time.

Driving with this motor is a dream. There's a lot of torque down low, so you don't mind too much tooling around town staying off the cam and getting 30 miles per gallon.

When you do need to get somewhere, the motor pulls strongly all the way to 9000 (9500 on the tach) without a hitch or evident flat spot.

It's hilarious.

And it didn't cost all that much.

I know that there are lots of people who can produce charts with higher horsepower, but this suits me just fine.