VW Passat R36 Tuning

"Thank you for reading this VW Passat R36 tuning tips."

The Passat R36 is a awesome tuning project to fill your spare time. The key to Passat R36 tuning is balancing power and reliability you can waste loads of money if you do it wrong.

Here we review and look at Passat R36 tuning and summarise the premier mods that work. VW Passat R36 are awesome to work on and with the optimum sports upgrades like remaps, turbo improvements and camshafts you will positively increase your driving experience.

Please watch our video introduction to VW Tuning.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Improving the handling for DIY mechanics first priority in your Passat R36 tuning project.

Putting slight negative camber on the fronts and a few degrees of toe in to improve stability or toe out for better cornering, will often benefit your Passat R36 in handling and cornering.

Drop the car optimally somewhere in the region of 24mm - 40 mm. and fit modified stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

Don't just look at the peak power figures, you need to see the whole torque curve when determining if a mod is right for you Passat R36.

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.

Engine tuning mods.

The following uprated parts are usually installed by our members, decide how far you wish to go in your tuning project before you get started.

3.6 VR6- https://www.torquecars.com/volkswagen/ea390-tuning.php

Getting the best performance upgrades for your planned usage of the car is a time and money saver. Stage 3 motor sport mods just don't work well on the road making the car difficult to drive.

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 24mm - 40 mm.), Lighter flywheel, Alloy wheels, Panel air filter, Sports exhaust, Remap.

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

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

Peak power is good on competition cars but for a daily driven car you need a long power band and perhaps extending the rev range.

The whole point of our pointers is to give a little insight into the world of tuning upgrades and point you in the right direction, our forum is best place to go if you need more detailed advice and tips on your tuning project, the best motorsport modifications and all aspects of modding cars.Fast road cams offer one of the biggest bhp gains for your money as far as a bolt on sports modifications goes on a NA (naturally aspirated) engine.

It maximises the intake and exhaust flow and pushes up the power if done right. Ideally you'd add other mods and finish up with a remap. We'd also caution you not to go with a motor sports profile cam as this upsets the engines idling and general town driving characteristics.

Don't forget to pay attention to the fuelling when you are increasing the power - it makes the car more thirsty.

If you find you suffer from flat spots and surges after your sports mods you should check the fuelling and try a higher octane fuel as well. Larger injectors will enable you to supply sufficient fuel to the 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.

The next area for modification is the intake and exhaust.  Contrary to popular belief there is generally very little if any power gain obtained by fitting an induction kit, they only become beneficial and are recommended after you boost 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.

Sports exhausts will certainly help air flow out of the engine but do not go too big or you could very well end up with a reduced flow rate. So generally speaking, keep to 1.5 to 2.5 inches as a rule of thumb.

Polishing and porting the head will allow you to maximise your air/fuel charge. Leave this to a professional though with a proper flow bench and machine tools When you start tuning your Passat R36 you will see that the standard clutch starts to fail so get an uprated clutch. The best mods that we recommend for your Passat R36 are fast road camshaft, remap, induction and exhaust, suspension.

Remaps offer big power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NA (naturally aspirated) engines the benefits are doubtful. However a tune/remap on a NA (naturally aspirated) engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods. Despite the large cost involved adding forced induction to a NA (naturally aspirated) engine will give large power gains. Turbos are generally harder to add than a supercharger. It is harder to map a turbo as the boost builds exponentially with engine speed.

Superchargers 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 engine compression ratio .

Alloy wheel upgrades.

Because alloys are lighter they improve performance and they can help to cool the brake disks. We can't go into too much detail here about tires but they are how the car puts the power down on the road so are a critical choice. directional tread pattern tires work well on Passat R36, and make a big difference over budget tires. Please note that although they can look cool on the Passat R36 large alloys 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.

With this in mind aim to keep the overall rolling diameter of the wheel the OEM setup. In all cases without going larger than 16 inches.

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 Passat R36 options in more detail with our Passat R36 owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased VW tuning articles to get a full grasp of the benefits and drawbacks of each modification.

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