Hyundai Sonata Tuning

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The Sonata is a good tuning project to play with. We review Sonata tuning and report on the best modifications.

Hyundai Sonatas have loads of potential and with the right upgrades you can really maximise your driving opportunities.

The key to Sonata tuning is choosing the right mods you can waste loads of money if you do it wrong.

Top end power should be your overall aim with a nice fat wide 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.

These mods modified kits are usually carried out by our members, decide how far you wish to go in your tuning project before you get started.

Getting the correct grade of motorsport upgrade kits for your planned usage of the car is essential. Stage 3 competition upgrades just don't work well on the road making the car difficult to drive.

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

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

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

Your targets when tuning should be a nice flat torque range. You want to avoid sending all the torque to be at the top end of the rev range unless you are creating a competition car.

In this article we shall give a limited introduction to the best modifications for your car, but we'd encourage you to spend some time on the site looking into the details of each type of performance mod.A fast road camshaft typically is one of the best NASP power modifications you can do with a single part fitted to your engine.

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

You will need to ensure that the engine is not starved of fuel so will need to ramp up the fuelling.

If you find you experience flat spots and surges after your performance upgrades you should check the fuelling and try a higher octane fuel as well. Improving the injectors is another beneficial modification and will deliver sufficient fuel.

Uprate the fuel pump to cope with the extra fuel requirements of your tuned Sonatas uprated injectors.

Intake and Exhaust Tuning.

Breathing mods are usually next up. Please note that WE DO NOT RECOMMEND INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car with over 30 percent more power and are finding that the standard air intake has become the bottleneck.

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 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 balance the flow of gases through the engine. But if your exhaust is too big, ie: over 2.5 inches bore, you will lose a great deal of the exhaust flow rate and end up lacking power and torque.

Airflow through the head can be dramatically increased with some professional head porting and polishing. These should match and be setup to take into account any other engine mods. A good multi plate fast road upgraded clutch will help to keep that power going where it should. Never skimp or think that your standard OEM clutch to cope. The best mods we recommend for your Sonata are a remap especially on a turbo, a fast road camshaft and sports exhaust, with a good air intake.

Turbo engines are just asking to be Remapped. You will see big power gains on most modern turbo charged cars including diesels making a remap one of the most cost effective and big modifications for your money.Adding forced induction will see impressive power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. Superchargers are usually easier to add than turbos. Turbos increase power in increasing proportion to rising engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.

It is simpler to map a supercharger because the boost is directly proportional to engine speed on a linear curve. Adding forced induction will generally require a lower compression ratio or water injection.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Handling modifications are the thing most do first for the Sonata.

Putting some negative camber on the wheels and around 1 to 1.7 degrees of toe out, will dramatically enhance your Sonata in handling and cornering.

We would go to a maximum drop of 23mm - 36 mm on most models. You risk grounding out if you go lower than this.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

The benefits of alloy wheels include lowering your unsprung weight and better brake cooling via the extra air flow they allow. 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 tyres.We should point out that although they can look cool on the Sonata 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.

For this reason we would advise sticking to a maximum wheel size of 17 inches, although we know some of our members have gone larger than this with no problems.

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

For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss Sonata options in more detail with our Sonata 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.

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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.

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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.

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