Best Stage 2 Mods

"Double your power with the right stage 2 mods & Upgrades"

We're going to focus on the best stage two mods for your car in this article.

You might want to read our article that explains the tuning stages or watch the following introductory video on our YouTube channel.

To Summarise these mods we have

Now this is where tuning your car starts to get really interesting, so we're going to discuss ten of the best mods you can do for your car.

Look out for number nine, because that's a mod that can potentially double your power.

So we've discussed stage one mods, those simple mods that don't require much expertise in fitting them on your car, and they don't require supporting mods in order to work, so now we're going to take things to stage two, where things start to get really interesting and you start to make significant power gains.

Before we begin looking at the 9 best stage 2 mods, it's worth saying that when you start adding mods together, you get more than the sum of their parts.

So, if you have a mod that gives you 10 brake horsepower and another that gives you 10 brake horsepower, combining them may give you the impression that you get 20 brake horsepower more, but in reality, you may get 25 or 30 brake horsepower more because they start to work together.

So think of every mod you bolt-on as adding a percentage of power to your car.

  1. Fast Road Camshafts
  2. DPF and Catalysts with Higher Flow Rates
  3. High Flow Fuel Injector & Fuel Pump Upgrades
  4. Porting Polishing the head
  5. Power/Sport Clutch
  6. Lighter Flywheels
  7. Nitrous Kits
  8. Remaps
  9. Turbo Upgrades

The more mods you add, the greater that percentage power gain is and you get a much better headline power figure at the end.

Here is our video on stage 2 tuning mods on our YouTube Channel.

1 Camshafts

So at number one we're looking at sports camshafts and sporty cam profiles.

Most manufacturers devise their cams to give you a reasonable economy, a decent bit of top-end power and maintain the reliability of your car.

So by altering the profile of your cam, which controls the intake valves and exhaust valves, you can make significantly more power.

Now I should say that some cars already have fairly aggressive cams fitted, so if you get it wrong, you can actually accelerate the wear and tear on the cam itself, and the valves in the engine can stop working as effectively as they were originally intended.

You can alter the lift. For example, if you're not getting the same amount of lift, you're not going to be making as much power as you otherwise would.

So see our videos on camshafts for more in-depth information on those, but they really are a significant way of adding power.

Maybe getting your OEM cam profile ground to a faster road profile may be the key.

So in stage one, we spoke about intake mods and exhaust mods, so in stage two you can assume that these mods have already been done, but we can start to look at the actual headers themselves.

The way they flow, the angles they machine, can make a difference to the power that you get, so it's really worth getting high-quality performance headers.

2 Exhaust and Intake

In the exhaust and intake to remove any restrictions in the intake and the flow rates going into and out of your engine and the exhaust bore.

We'll also mention that the typical restrictions you get in the exhaust to the dpf filters, the particulate filters on diesels.

It's a honeycomb that's designed to create reactions with the exhaust gases and remove the harmful gases that you don't want to be pushing out into the environment, so if these are restrictive, they'll be bottlenecks and sap power, so you will usually get a performance benefit by adding a faster-flowing alternative.

They're often bigger, the cell sizes are larger, and they're still as effective as the OEM cat, but they don't restrict the flow through them as much.

It's certainly worth paying attention to these potential bottlenecks in your system, especially when we come to stage two tuning where we're going to be throwing a lot of extra mods into the car.

We don't want anything to hold it back.

3 Fuelling

So another stage 2 mod is thinking about the fueling

It's always a case that when you tune a car you want to add more fuel and more air and by combining those your car will make more power.

Now people often forget about the fueling they focus on mods that improve the airflow in and out of the engine but without sufficient fuel you may well hit an upper limit.

Pushing through that is impossible unless you've upgraded the injectors so getting higher capacity injectors usually requires a more beefy fuel pump to supply enough fuel to those injectors. it will remove the restriction in your fuel supply system.

I will say that just adding better injectors will not usually make more power unless your existing injectors have become clogged and ineffective.

rather than adding power you're just restoring the lost power but if you go to stage two tuning you really do want to think about the whole engine and getting as much in there as you can to maximize your power gains .

fuel injectors and the fuel pump are significant areas that need to be focused on and addressed.

it's usually recommended by most tuners that we speak to to go 20% better on the flow rate so rather than just working out what the flow rate needs to be and getting injectors to match that.

They will degrade as they age, and you really want the benefit of having that extra capacity, so as they begin to wear, they are less effective, and you begin to eat into that 20% of headroom that you've built in.

But you won't get flat spots you won't get breakdowns you won't get issues if you do that so always over specify the flow rate on your injectors

4 Flowing and Porting the Head

So we start thinking now about actually removing the head on the engine itself.

The head is quite a busy network of junctions.

It controls the air coming into the engine, the fuel unless you've got direct injection, and the exhaust as well.

So just maximizing the channels and flow rates, making sure there's no restrictions.

If you really went to town, you'd probably try and straighten some of these port openings and entranceways into the engine to just maximize the ability of that head to flow air in and out of the engine, but the valves and the area around the valves are important.

The air goes between the valves when they're open into the engine, and by doing a three or five angle valve job on the valve seat, you can maximise that airflow and you get a better seal when the valve is actually closed.

As a result, we strongly advise you to have this done professionally.

It's not the sort of job you can just do with a grinding wheel, so it really does pay to get someone who knows what they're doing.

5 Clutch

So another area that you need to address with stage two mods is your clutch.

That's usually one of the first things to show up a problem, and it will start to slip.

You're now making 20, 40, 50, you might even have doubled your power, so expecting that standard factory clutch to cope is asking a bit much.

It's just not designed to handle these levels of power and torque, so getting an uprated clutch is a significant benefit and certainly should be a part of every single stage two tuning project.

There are quite a few considerations to buying a clutch.

There are lots of options in clutch materials and clutch designs.

You've got multi-plate clutches as well, so we discussed those in another article.

We're just going to flag up the fact that we need to pay attention to the clutch and get a clutch that's appropriate to the power levels that we're now producing through the stage 2 tuning that we've done to the car so far .

6 Flywheel

While we're talking about the clutch it makes sense to talk about the flywheel. This big hunk of metal attaches to the clutch assembly and stores the rotational energy from the engine.

So, by using lightning, you get faster responses on your rev changes; for example, a sports car or race car will rev very quickly, whereas a road car will press the accelerator and it will slowly rise and then fall.

Most of that is down to the flywheel and the weight of the flywheel so in most cases reducing the weight of the flywheel will enhance that rev change it'll make it much faster. It's more suited to fast driving and track work.

there are some engines that i really would not recommend going much lighter or converting a dual-mass flywheel into a single mass flywheel.

We've done a video covering flywheels in a bit more detail so be sure to check out that video and get all the information you need so you can make the right decision for you for your car for your engine, and to match your expectations and what you're trying to get out of your stage 2 car tuning project.

7 Nitrous Kits

Another mod we're going to mention are nitrous kits.

Nitrous oxide is a gas and as it burns it releases oxygen, so as well as adding fuel it's adding its own oxygen to the mix, and often you need to match your nitrous kit with an additional fuel injector, such as the oxygen generated by the burning process of having a nitrous kit.

For example, your nitrous bottle only holds a finite amount of nitrous, so it's not really a mod that you can just use all of the time.

It's reserved for those bursts of power that you need on the track in drag races.

It's impressive to add 50 brake horsepower to your engine just by bolting on the mod, but it's a lot more complex than that.

You've got different types of nitrous systems that you can include in your car, and it's interesting to just investigate.

It's a nice way of adding substantial power to your car, but as we said earlier, it's only suitable for giving you bursts of power for fairly short durations and at wide-open throttle.

It doesn't do much for your everyday drivability and improving the car on a daily basis.

8 Remapping Stage 2

So now we come to the ninth mod, which was actually the best mod we recommended on stage one, and that's remapping.

You're no longer just engine tuning/remapping a factory spec oem engine. You're starting to add other mods.

The map can take into account other mods like your fast road camshaft and the lighter flywheel.

You can dramatically alter the way the engine works and with stage 2 mods you can do so much with the timing, the spark advance, the fueling and everything that your ecu controls.

By tightening that up, it releases all of that power that you've built into your stage 2 mods and stage 2 project.

It really is a no-brainer to get a stage 2 map done on your car.

9 Adding A Turbo & Turbo Upgrades

So if you've got an naturally aspirated engine, there's a lot of work involved in adding a turbo to it, but that work does pay off.

You can literally double the power that you make with a naturally aspirated engine.

You'll need to lower the compression ratio in most cases and fit stronger internal components, but when you think about it, you're adding so much more power that it just makes sense to do all of those things anyway.

If you've already got a turbo engine, you've probably got stronger components in it.

For example, a lot of manufacturers will use forged pistons, forged cranks, and bigger port sizes on the head.

So we've got the scope there to just add a larger turbo.

Now adding a larger turbo will dramatically alter the profile of the power that you get.

So you can dramatically alter the profile of the power that you get.

You can with a big turbo, get significant power gains at the top end.

We've done other videos on turbos and we've got some more plans, so turbo mods are a great way of adding significant amounts of power to your engine, so be sure to subscribe to our channel if you've not done so already.

We've got lots of in-depth videos & more articles coming up soon to help you get the most from your tuning project.

This has been a very general guide to stage 2 tuning, but I'm working my way through all of the topics that we've been asked to cover, so don't forget to stay tuned and please like this video if you haven't done so already, because it really helps us to get out there.

If you want to learn more, or just get more pointers on Tuning your engine please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss Civic 5th Gen tuning options in more detail with our members. It would also be worth reading our unbiased tuning articles to get insights into each modification and how effective they will be.

Please help us improve these tips by sending us your feedback in the comments box below. Please let us know in the comments below what aspects of car tuning would interest you and please also let us know what mods you've done to your or if you feel we have missed any information out in this article, we are all here to learn and share what we know.

We love to know what our visitors have got up to and which upgrades work best for them on each model of car. We use your comments and feedback to improve the accuracy of these Civic 5th Gen tuning guides which get regular updates and revisions.

Please Check out my YouTube channel, we're regularly adding new content...

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