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Review on Tuning Developments NA KIT + stock exhaust. I drove 200 miles to meet Mike at TD today so had plenty of time to remind myself how the car drives stock. I drove another 200 miles home after. This is my review, hopefully it can help somebody else decide if they want to do the same one day. NA KIT, UEL Header. With the stock exhaust (except the header and overpipe) the car is barely louder than stock, the exhaust tone changed however. On my drive home most of it was motorway driving so 70mph at 3000RPM gear 6... the car felt like a different car in that situation, the only way to describe it is the car felt like it had lost 100kg of weight, or something like that. It felt really throwable if that makes sense, or like someone had attached rope to the front of it and was pulling it lol. Another big thing you will notice is... imagine a drag race ... when you accelerate in gear 1... 0mph to 25mph, as you start at 0RPM and go to 7000RPM you will notice the 0-4000RPM range will be much more aggressive, my tyres smelt as a result once I got home😂. Once you enter gear 2 at 25MPH you will already be at 4000RPM thus the improvement will be less noticeable. if however you were at 3000RPM in gear 2 then you would feel the increase just like you did in gear 1. the 20ish% more torque low end makes the car feel very light and agile. on my drive home I kept finding myself getting to 100Kmph* by accident because the car can pick up so much faster in gear 6 at 3000RPM. Not good since the m6 has so many speed cameras😂 Mike himself was lovely and for 3 hours sat in his office and answered all my random questions until my car was finished. I have done 210 miles with the kit 190 being motorway driving. If I think of anything useful to add later I will. —————————stuff I added later———————— I feel that from 0miles to 300miles after the install the kit keeps improving both the sound of the exhaust and feel of the drive. Like wearing in leather shoes. Don’t know if this is true but it’s how it felt to me. Something which pleasantly surprised me was that the kit made the exhaust smell nice, you know like a strong petrol smell. That which you smell from a straight piped car. I never considered this when buying it but a pleasant extra lol. The 5mph to 30mph gear 1 pull makes it worth it by itself it makes me laugh how that changed so much. I feel not having to be at 5000 rpm to feel power inspires confidence in me driving, not a dangerous confidence but I just feel like I don’t have to be on the limit to get power sort of confidence. I also rarely even go to 6000rpm as I don’t need to be squeezing power from the car. That could be seen as a reliability gain?

Nice to see the impact when nothing has been done downwind of that. 12 whp gain isn't bad going for still catalysed and with a nice 10-20 lbft improvement in the convenient range. In practice, a ~10% increase in torque at 3500 rpm is very much like the car weighing ~100kg less, albeit at the cost of a bit more fuel. Edit: kmh, I knew it!

Went out for a little run to keep the battery happy. Rushed off a couple of photos as couldn't resist (despite the questionable parking) being right in front of the reservoir.

Do we have the same car? Exactly the 2 rattles that drive me mad, although my glovebox rattles and so does the gear lever. I'm driving a 13 year old Micra at the minute and it genuinely rattles less than my car. I find when you are rattling hunting this works quite well (especially if you have a subwoofer). Download a frequency generator app on your phone then connect to your headunit with bluetooth, run the frequency app and play specific frequencies through your speakers, I've found that as you scroll down through the frequency range 400Hz and lower, you trigger all sorts of rattles to start, then you can hunt them down at your leisure rather than trying to figure it out whilst driving.

Road noise really increases when rear tyres wear out, so it can get fairly loud on the motorway. The motorway is also where the driving is boring and I can catch up listening to boring interviews with nerdy people. But then I can't hear the interview and I have to choose. Switch to music? Make the drive more interesting? Try out hypermiling? Drive backwards? Meditate?

Nice day yesterday, so engine clean up time!