Diesel cars in India have come a long way. A few decades ago, they were truly agrarian in nature. Only the misers used such cars, the boring, going-nowhere folks whose sole purpose was to stretch that fuel mile, speedometer stuck at 40 km/h, be ignored. But then something happened, the tech advancements began to get made & thanks to the fuel pricing policies, diesels started to catch on in a big way.
Today, the diesel cars in India are in many ways outperforming their petrol counterparts on most, if not all, of the key evaluative points. They’re more fuel efficient, drive better, are just as quiet or nearly so and have near-equivalent maintenance costs too!
Nothing like more power however and once you get attached to the ‘turbo rush’, there’s no turning back. Thankfully, bumping up a diesel engine is relatively easier than thought & wides-spread too. So here’s how to modify your diesel car for more performance:
Most diesel cars in India these days come equipped with turbochargers. Enthusiast owners, particularly of those cars which are widely available overseas, often swap out the stock ones for larger, more efficient larger units which increase the ‘whack’ when the throttle is displaced.
But before you go in for something as significant as a turbo-swap, why not focus on some essentials – such as better breathing. Improving & increasing the cold-air flow to the engine means cleaner, colder air is supplied in increased doses, thereby letting it make more power.
Similarly, the exhaust gases too must be dealt with and there’s nothing like a free-flow exhaust to really get the gases flowing. Available in mild & stainless steel, there’s everything from a full-flow exhaust, to custom made exhausts. The key is to get one that’s tuned to your car’s engine characteristics, as a generic purpose one, will either not deliver the benefits, or worse, cause damage to the engine internals.
FIP-mods were a common answer to how to modify your diesel car for more performance back in the day, when ECU’s were a rarity. The fuel-injection pump was modified to thrown increased fuel thereby burning more fuel per throttle input & delivering improved performance. All this however, did impact the fuel economy and had to be done carefully, to avoid shortening the life of the pump or putting strain on the engine as well.
These days, there are dedicated chips with custom code that piggybacks on the existing OEM one and replacement ECU’s with performance maps hard-coded into them. These offer the best output per rupee spent but can cost a bomb. So choose wisely & rev hard!
