There are plenty of products in the aftermarket realm that claim to free up or create more horsepower. While some of these use skewed data or are just plain false, I was eager to test out one of the most common such products: the cold air intake. I wanted to start with a vehicle that was modern, had low miles, and was completely stock, to prevent any variables in the results. One problem though: none of my personal vehicles fit the criteria. However, my father’s 2021 Mustang GT fit the bill, and better yet, Christmas was just around the corner.
In case you haven’t caught onto my gift giving theme for my father on holidays, it usually revolves around his Mustang. This works out well, as he enjoys products being thrown onto his pride and joy, and I enjoy driving the car around for the week. Albeit all things labor fall into my lap, and even after the work is done the duty of showcasing results to the public is once again mine. Needless to say, it’s a tiresome process, but one that I relish in knowing that my siblings are fighting a losing battle by gifting t-shirts and gift cards in neatly organized bags, versus me throwing horsepower and aesthetics at his S550.
Trying to remove as many variables as possible, we decided to use the Dynocom hub dyno of Aikman Performance. This would eliminate any variable frictional loss compared to other dynos.
The factory intake on the S550 Mustang isn’t visually obtrusive or as ungodly awful as earlier years of Mustang. This adventure wasn’t to clean up the engine bay, but rather, clean up the rumor mill of what a properly designed cold air intake could do with a tune. Since we were going after horsepower, I decided to utilize the tune-required Steeda Mustang GT ProFlow Open Cold Air Intake paired to a SCT Livewire TS+ Performance Programmer, using Steeda’s tune to see what kind of numbers the dyno would show.
Before we started throwing products into the engine bay and uploading CAI tunes, I wanted to see what horsepower, at the wheels, Ford had given purchasers of the pony car. Step two would be seeing what gains can be seen with a tune-only setup, before the final step of installing the Steeda cold air intake and uploading the cold air intake specific mapping.
Although it wasn’t mine, I still wanted to play with the SCT Livewire TS+ before handing it over to my father. I wanted to see just how much better the Livewire TS+ was compared to my…
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