Hyundai Santa Fe Tuning

"Thanks for reading this Hyundai Santa Fe tuning guide."

The Santa Fe is a good tuning project to do. With the right mods your Santa Fe can be transformed into a fun car.

We review Santa Fe tuning and summarise the ultimate upgrades. Hyundai Santa Fe make awesome project cars and with carefully picked tuning mods you can greatly increase your driving experience.

Don't waste money, do your homework and follow our unbiased guides to each performance upgrade so you don't waste your money.

Turning our attention to the Santa Fe's engine we need to get a bit more power out of the top end.

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.

Typically these uprated modifications are usually fitted by our members, decide how far you wish to go in your tuning project before you start.

Getting the best modified mods for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 motor sport mods just won't work well on the road hard to control in slow traffic.

Stage 1 modifications: Remap, Lighter flywheel, Suspension upgrade (drop 30-40mm), Panel air filter, Alloy wheels, Sports exhaust.

Stage 2 modifications: high flow fuel injector, Fast road cam, Power/Sport clutch, Ported and polished head, fuel pump upgrades.

Stage 3 modifications: Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves), Sports gearbox, Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger), Engine balancing, Competition cam.

You really need to keep as much low end torque as possible and aim to get a wide power band across the rev range rather than a narrow top end power spike.

In this article we shall give a limited introduction 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 upgrade.Fast road cams offer one of the biggest power gains for your money as far as a solitary uprated upgrades goes on a NASP 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 performance chip. We'd also caution you not to go with a motor sport cam as this affects 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 power surges after your sports upgrades you should check the fuelling and try a higher octane fuel as well. Higher capacity injectors will enable you to supply sufficient fuel to the engine.

If have increased 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. Contrary to popular belief there is often very little power gain achieved 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!

Derestricting the air feed into the engine is a primary goal of tuning so get a better flowing air filter if you find that the car is running lean. Induction kits can sound sporty but due to the warm air in the engine bay they will not add noticeable power and usually rob you of power.

Sports exhausts can usually air flow through the engine but avoid an exhaust that is too big or you may end up will reduce the flow rate. Stick to 1.5 to 2.5 inches for best results.

gas flowing 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 Santa Fe you will often find that the standard clutch starts to slip so get an uprated clutch. The best mods we would do for your Santa Fe are remaps, sports camshafts and induction improvements.

Remaps offer large power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful. However a remapped ECU on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods. The most significant power gains for NASP engines usually involve the addition of forced induction. It is generally simpler to add a supercharger than it is to bolt on a turbo. Turbos increase power in exponential proportion to th engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.

The nice proportional boost and rpm characteristics of the supercharger make them more straightforward to map. Adding forced induction will usually require a lower compression ratio or water injection.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

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

We found that most Santa Fe factory suspension setups need tweaking, a few degrees of toe out -1 to 2, and slight negative camber will substantially improve your cornering and handling.

Drop the car by as much as 25mm - 39 mm and fit motorsport grade stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

The benefits of alloy wheels include a lower unsprung weight and more efficient brake cooling via the extra air flow they allow. We can't go into too much detail here about tyres but they are how the car puts the power down on the road so are a critical choice. track legal slick tyres work well on Santa Fe, and make a big difference over budget tyres. The drawback to large rims on your Santa Fe is that you alter your final drive ratio and this will have a detrimental effect on acceleration.

Due to this endeavour to keep the overall rolling diameter of the wheel the recommended OEM sizes. In all cases without going over 18 inches.

There is a more updated version of this Hyundai Santa Fe Tuning article on TorqueCars.com.

For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss Santa Fe options in more detail with our Santa Fe owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Hyundai tuning articles to get a full grasp of the benefits and drawbacks of each modification.

Please help us to improve this article, we need your feedback in the comments box below which is there for you to pass on any tips, pointers or facts we might not have covered..

We really like hearing from our readers, and hearing about which upgrades were the most effective for them, it helps us improve our recommendations and articles to reflect current trends in modifications and ensures that our EZ engine guides and tips are kept up to date and we remind our visitors of our non profit non commercial approach to running this site.

All comments received are used to improve the accuracy of our site and these articles which are continually amended, tweaked and updated.

Please Check out my YouTube channel, we're regularly adding new content...

Click to accept YouTube Cookies & Play.

This article is flagged for an update, so please pass on specific tips below that I can include. All articles, and content was written by me, Waynne Smith TorqueCars founder. Some outlines are just too general so I appreciate your feedback and suggestions. This entry was filed under Hyundai. You can leave a response below or join our forum to discuss this article and car modification in detail with our members.

If you liked this page please share it with your friends, drop a link to it in your favourite forum or use the bookmarking options to save it to your social media profile.