Land Rover Discovery Tuning

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We take a peek at Discovery tuning and show the best upgrades. Land Rover Discovery makes for a popular tuning projects and with the best uprated tuning mods you can positively improve your driving enjoyment.

The Discovery is a good car tuning project to have. With the right mods your Discovery can be transformed into a stunning project. Don't waste money, do your homework and follow our unbiased guides to each performance upgrade to avoid disappointment.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Handling modifications are usually your first port of call for the Discovery.

Good suspension tweaks that substantially benefit handling for the Discovery include a couple of degrees negative camber and 1-1.5 degrees of toe in or out on the front wheels. Toe in for stability, or Toe out to improve cornering. It would also pay to improve the brakes, by adding larger discs and or higher friction pads..

For sporty handling you could drop the car optimally somewhere in the region of 28mm - 39 mm and fit motorsport grade stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances. To be frank though, the Discovery is an offroad enabled car and looks right on higher suspension. Fitting good springs and slightly firmer damping will help the cornering without compromising the look of the car.

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

The best power gains come from larger engine sizes. The more you start with the bigger the return on investment so engine swaps are good value mods for small engined cars.

Tuning modifications.

The following modified kits are usually installed by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you start.

Getting the right motorsport parts for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 (competition) mods just won't work well on the road difficult in stop start traffic.

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: Panel air filter, Engine Tunes/Remapping, Sports exhaust, Lighter flywheel, Alloy wheels, Suspension upgrade (drop 30-40mm).

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

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

Your aim when modding your car should be a nice flat torque range. You don't want all the torque to be at the top end unless you are creating a competition car.

In this article we shall give a brief overview to the best performance parts 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.Fast road cams offer one of the biggest bhp gains for your money as far as a bolt on modified upgrades goes on a NA (naturally aspirated) engine.

The intake and exhaust durations play a large part in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car difficult to drive in traffic. You'd need to follow a cam upgrade with other mods and finish with a reflashed ECU to fully release the power gain.

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

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

A fuel pump will only deliver a finite amount of fuel, so you may need to uprate this if your injectors are demanding more fuel.

Intake and Exhaust Tuning.

Now we move on to the intake and exhaust and ensure proper flow through the engine. Contrary to popular belief there is usually very little power gain obtained by fitting an induction kit, they only work well and are recommended after you raise the engines power to the point where the standard air intake box cannot cope!

Maximum power gains come from a full induction kit with a cold air feed on heavily tuned engines, this can be sited within an air box but a performance panel filter should suffice for most applications. TorqueCars suggest you use a panel air filter as these are easy to clean and maintain and generally perform better than paper ones.

Do not go with the widest exhaust you can find this will slow up the exhaust flow rate - the best for power gains are usually between 1.5 to 2.5 inches. It is the shape and material more than the bore size.

Head work including a gas flow (ported and polished) and 3 or 5 angle valve job will really help to release the potential of the engine. In nearly all cases of Discovery tuning your clutch will start to slip and this should be improved - read our article on clutches for more information. The best mods we would do for your Discovery are remaps, sports camshafts and induction improvements.

Turbo engines are just pleading to be Remapped. You will see massive power gains on most modern turbo engined cars including diesels making a tune/remap one of the most cost effective and massive modifications for your money.Adding forced induction will see significant power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. It is generally simpler to bolt on a supercharger than it is to install a turbo. Turbos provide boost in exponential proportion to th engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.

The nice directly proportional boost and rpm characteristics of the supercharger make them easier to map. Alternatively you could perhaps add water injection to control knock.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

The benefits of alloy wheels include a lower unsprung weight and better brake cooling. Don't forget that your choice of rubber greatly affects your cars grip and handling. It is not worth compromising performance with cheap tyres when you can buy directional tread pattern performance tires.It is worth noting that although they can look cool on the Discovery big alloy wheels will actually decrease your performance. The larger you go the lower your acceleration will be - this to the change in your effective final drive ratio.

Although some people have gone larger than this without problems we would personally choose to stick with an 18 inch rim size as the maximum.

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 Discovery options in more detail with our Discovery owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Land Rover tuning articles to get a full grasp of the benefits and drawbacks of each modification.

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