Jeep Compass Tuning

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The Compass is a awesome tuning project to have. We see people wasting money on their Compass doing the wrong mods and then having to start over. Follow our guides to avoid making the common mistakes

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Many Compass owners uprate the handling of their cars with modified suspension kits as a priority, this will certainly increase your enjoyment of the car.

We found that most Compass factory suspension setups need tweaking, a few degrees of toe out for cornering or toe in for stability, 0.9 to 1.5, and a little negative camber will radically improve your cornering and handling.

Drop the car optimally somewhere in the region of 23mm - 37 mm. and fit modified stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

Top end power should be your overall aim on the Compass with a nice fat peak torque band.

Smaller engines do not provide much of a return in terms of power so start with a bigger engine. Engine swaps are a good option if you have a small engine size.

Engine Tuning.

This list of the stages and performance modifications are usually carried out by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you get going.

Getting the best sports modifications for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 competition upgrades just won't work well on the road making the car difficult to drive.

Please watch our video which covers the 5 principles of tuning your car. Be sure to keep up with our latest YouTube content and subscribe.

Best Engine Mods for your car

1. Engine Tunes - engine tuning/remapping provides the most advantage in terms of cost savings,  aftermarket ECUs, and piggyback ECUs are all alternatives.
2. Fast road cams are one of the most significant mechanical changes, but they must be installed by someone who knows what they're doing and they are not always easy to source but you might find a local firm to regrind a stock camshaft.
3. Intake and Exhaust - Note that on their own these mods will NOT ADD POWER in most cases, but they can help enhance power after other mods by removing the restriction.
4. Upgrades to turbochargers and superchargers - forced induction is the most efficient approach to increase air supply, allowing you to burn more fuel and make more power. It is one of the most costly upgrades but provides the best gains.
5. Head work - The goals of porting and flowing the head are to get air flowing into the engine while removing flow restrictions and turbulence.

Typical stage 1 mods often include: Suspension upgrade (drop 23mm - 37 mm.), Engine Tunes/Remapping, Alloy wheels, Sports exhaust, Panel air filter, Lighter flywheel.

Typical stage 2 mods often include: Fast road cam, fuel pump upgrades, Power/Sport clutch, high flow fuel injector, Ported and polished head.

Typical stage 3 mods often include: Competition cam, Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger), Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves), Sports gearbox, Engine balancing.

Your aim when tuning should be a flat and wide torque range. You want to avoid sending all the power to be at the top end of the rev range unless you are creating a motor sport car.

In this article we shall give a brief overview to the best upgrades for your car, but we'd encourage you to spend some time on the site looking into the details of each type of performance part.One of the biggest mechanical mods you can do to your NA (naturally aspirated) engine is to fit a fast road camshaft .

The exhaust and intake valve timings play a huge factor in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car awkward to drive in traffic. You'd need to follow a camshaft upgrade with other mods and finish with a performance chip to fully release the power gain.

When pushing up the power you will need to uprate to the fuelling. More power needs more fuel.

Most power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after modified mods are done can usually be traced to fuelling or timing issues. To get sufficient fuel you may need to uprate the injectors on your engine.

If you are increasing your fuelling with bigger injectors you will also need to get a bigger fuel pump to supply it.

Intake and Exhaust Tuning.

Now we move on to the intake and exhaust and ensure proper flow through the engine. Please note that WE DO NOT FEEL YOU GET POWER GAINS FROM INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car a lot and are finding that the standard air intake has become a restriction.

Induction kits can work well on turbo engines and larger engines (if supplied with a suitable cold air feed or air box), generally though we'd just recommend for Compass engines you should just fit a high performance panel air filter preferably made from cotton.

Sports exhausts can usually air flow out of the engine but do not go too large or you might just stuff your flow rate and make things worse. So generally speaking, keep to a size of 1.5 to around 2.5 inches to maximise flow rates, and this should take into account the amount of air your engine is moving.

Getting a professionally flowed (ported and polished) head with larger valves can fully release the engines power. Your clutch can fail as the power goes up if it starts to fail and the standard clutches are only ever good for power gains of up to 45%. Fit a competition clutch to avoid power loss through the transmission. The best mods we recommend for your Compass are remaps, sports camshafts and induction improvements.

Turbo engines are just crying out to be Remapped. You will see big power gains on most modern turbo engined cars including diesels making a tune/remap one of the most cost effective and big modifications for your money.Adding forced induction will see massive power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. Superchargers are often easier to add than turbos. Turbos increase power in exponential proportion to rising engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.

It is simpler to map a supercharger because the boost is correlating to engine speed on a linear curve. Decreasing the engines compression ratio will allow you to add forced induction, water injection may also help prevent detonation.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

The benefits of alloys include reducing your unsprung weight and more efficient brake cooling. Pay attention to your choice of tyres (tires) for your car, a good directional tread pattern tire can really enhance your cars handling. The downside to large alloy wheels on your Compass is that you're altering your 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.

If you would like to know more, or just get some friendly advice on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss Compass options in more detail with our Compass owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Jeep tuning articles to get a full grasp of the benefits and drawbacks of each modification.

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