Tuning guide for 200/400/600 Intercooled cars

I’ll describe how I’d tune these car and list some arbitary budgets in mind to spend on it and what you may achieve. I’ve assumed at each stage that all the previous stages have been done. These are my own views and so other people may disagree. Read up and make your own decisions.

Step 1 –

Tuning box and boost increase to 19psi. The boost increase can be free if you tweak the actuator. The tuning boxes that are tried and tested are available at a variety of prices.

The lowest price is produced by Garf on the mg-rover.org forums and is a simple variable resistor to increase the fuelling. Other tried and tested boxes are the TU1 and Synergy VP from RoverRon also of the mg-rover forums. If one of these turns up second hand then it is well worth getting one even if you aren’t a performance freak as it makes the cars sooooo much nicer to drive.

Cost £20-150

Power achievable ~120bhp/200ftlb

Step 2 –

Add a decat to remove the catalytic converter and this’ll improve the turbo spool a little.

Cost £0 to £~50

Power achievable ~125bhp/200ftlb

Step 3 –

We are starting to run out of big wins in terms of performance. The 2 things that we’ve not yet done are the air filter and the exhaust. In my opinion the exhaust is more important than the air filter, but many people will already have fitted a cone air filter by now. Most people will plumb for green cotton cone filter such as the K4.80

Then we need to look at the backbox. There is only one silencer in the exhaust so a performance backbox can help release the final few ponies. Custom jobbies aren’t going to be cheap,

Budget – £100-200

Power achievable ~135bhp/200ftlb

This is about the limit of “cheap” tuning for the intercooled models. If you are after more power than this then you’ll need a bigger turbo. You can potentially release a little more torque from a re-chip, (remaps aren’t possible on the 2/4/600’s), but these are quite expensive due to the amount of work needed to open up the ECU and solder a new chip into it.