944 Tuning

"A Porsche for the Masses."

We have a few Porsche owners among our members and quite rightly so, the 944 offers good levels of fun at a great price.

Some of our members have used Porsche engines in other projects including a Morris Minor and a number of Classic VW Beetles so there are plenty of mods you can do to a Porsche engine. Improving the handling should be your first priority in your 944 tuning project. Drop the car by as much as 35mm and fit stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

Turning our attention to the 944s engine we need to get a bit more power out of the top end.

Porsche 944 Tuning modifications.

This will help to ensure you retain some economy low down. One of the best mechanical mods you can do is to fit a fast road cam. When pushing up the power you will need to pay attention to the fuelling. More power needs more fuel. Improve your cars response to the throttle with a Fuel pressure boost valve. Uprating the injectors is another beneficial modification and will deliver sufficient fuel. A fuel pump will only deliver a finite amount of fuel, so you may need to uprate this.

Porsche 944 Intake and Exhaust.

Now we move on to the intake and exhaust and ensure proper flow through the engine. Induction kits work well on turbo engines and larger engines, for the smaller 944 engines you should go with a sports panel air filter. Do not go with the biggest exhaust you can find - the best for power gains are usually between 1.5 to 2.5 inches.

A good fast road power clutch will help to keep that power going where it should. Never skimp or expect a standard clutch to cope. Remaps offer significant power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful, but will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods. Adding forced induction will see big power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. Superchargers are generally easier to add than turbos. It is harder to map a turbo as the boost comes on exponentially with engine speed. Superchargers however will give a boost which is proportional to engine speed so is easier to map. To cope with forced induction you will usually need to decrease the compression ratio of the engine.

Porsche 944 Wheel modifications.

The benefits of alloy wheels include a lower unsprung weight and more efficient brake cooling. The downside to large alloy wheels on your 944 is that you alter your effective final drive ratio and this will have a detrimental effect on performance. For this reason we would advise sticking to a maximum wheel size of 18 inches, although we know some of our members have gone larger than this with no problems.

Join us in our forum and meet up with other 944 owners where you can chat and swap tuning ideas for your car. Also have a read of our tuning articles to see what the pros and cons are of the many tuning options open to you.