Porsche Cayenne Tuning

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Porsche needed something to compete in the SUV market, and came up with the rather stunning Cayenne.

Although large and heavy Porsche have proved that if you give it enough power and a good setup it can still feel sporty.

We take a peek at the world of Cayenne tuning and highlight the premier modifications for your car. Porsche Cayenne's have loads of potential and with the right tuning mods you can dramatically enhance your driving opportunities.

The Cayenne is a good car tuning project to play with. Plan ahead and research Cayenne tuning to save yourself making the usual tuning errors we regularly get told about.

Top end power should be your overall aim on the Cayenne with a nice fat peak torque band.

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.

This list of the stages and uprated mods are usually installed by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you begin.

Getting the correct grade of tuning mods for your planned usage of the car is a time and money saver. Stage 3 (competition) mods just won't work well on the road difficult in stop start traffic.

Please watch TorqueCars Video tutorial on car tuning. And be sure to subscribe and support our new channel.

Stages of Tune

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

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

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

Peak power is all well and good but for a daily driven car you need a long torque band and perhaps extending the rev range.

In this article we shall give a little insight into the world to the best mods 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.A fast road camshaft is widely accepted as one of the best NASP power mods you can do from a single upgrade to your engine.

The intake & exhaust durations 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 camshaft upgrade with other mods and finish with a remap to fully realise your gains.

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

Most power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after uprated modifications are done can usually be traced to timing or fuelling issues.To get sufficient fuel you may need to increase the injectors on your 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.

For most Cayenne engines TorqueCars would suggest you just go with a washable panel air filter. On heavily tuned engines and turbo vehicles an induction kit will help release the power providing you address the problem of supplying cold air.

Sports exhausts can help balance the flow of gases through the engine. But if the exhaust is too big, ie: it's over 2.5 inches bore, you will lose a great deal of your flow rate and end up losing power and torque.

Getting the head ported and polished will further help more air into each cylinder.

This is definitely a job for a professional with a flow bench. Your clutch can slip if it starts to suffer and the standard clutches are only ever good for power gains of up to 46%.

Fit an upgraded clutch to avoid power leak through the transmission. The best mods that we recommend for your Cayenne are remaps, sports camshafts and induction improvements.

Remaps offer big power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful.

However a chipped ECU on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods.

Adding forced induction will see massive power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. Superchargers are often easier to add than a turbo. With a turbo the power curve is related exponentially to the engine speed making it harder to map.

Superchargers, however will give a boost which is correlating to engine speed so is easier to map. Adding forced induction will often require a lower compression ratio or water injection.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

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

Fully adjustable suspension allows you to fine tune the handling of you Cayenne radically benefiting your drive.

We would go to a maximum drop of 25mm - 36 mm on most models. You risk grounding out if you go lower than this.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

Alloy wheels can help the brake cooling and are generally lighter than the steel ones. If you are serious about performance then you will need to carefully choose your tyres - ideally with a soft compound tyre.

The Cayenne is really crying out for some chunky looking off road tyres but this will not work too well on tarmac roads, so there is a compromise to be made here.

Please note that although they can look cool on the Cayenne large alloy wheels 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.

Due to this aim to keep the overall rolling diameter of the wheel the same as supplied from the factory. In all cases without going bigger than 18 inches.

There is a more updated version of this Porsche Cayenne Tuning article on TorqueCars.com.

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

We need your help improving this article, so please send us your feedback in the comments box below and pass on any tips, points or facts we have wrong or have not covered.

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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 Porsche. 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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