Seat Altea Tuning

"Tuning guide to the best Seat Altea modifications."

We review Altea tuning and point out the greatest modifications.

Seat Altea provide a good base for your project and with the best sports upgrades you can greatly enhance your driving enjoyment of what was intended to be a practical family car.

The Altea is a good project car to do. We see DIY mechanics wasting money on their Altea doing the wrong mods and then having to start over. Follow our guides to avoid ruining your car

Our aim in Altea engine tuning should be to increase peak power and Torque at 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 mods.

These are the kits are usually installed by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you get started.

Getting the correct grade of performance modifications for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 competition upgrades just won't work well on the road hard to control in slow traffic.

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Stages of Tune

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

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

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

You really need to keep as much low end power as you can and aim to get a wide power band rather than a narrow top end power spike.

In this article we shall give a brief overview 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 upgrade.A fast road camshaft usually proves to be one of the best NASP power mods you can do with a single part fitted to your engine.

It improves 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. TorqueCars would caution you not to go with a competition cam as this upsets the engines idling and general town driving characteristics.

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

Most power losses, and erratic idling after motorsport modifications are done can usually be traced to timing or fuel delivery issues.Increasing the injectors is another beneficial modification and will deliver sufficient fuel.

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.

Breathing mods are usually next up. Please note that WE DO NOT RECOMMEND INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car massively and are finding that the standard air intake has become a limitation.

For most Altea 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 needing cold air.

Do not go with the biggest exhaust you can find this will slow up the exhaust flow rate - the best for power gains are usually between 1.5 to 2.5 inches. It is the shape and material more than the bore size.

Polishing and porting 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 In nearly all cases of Altea tuning your clutch will start to fail and this needs an upgrade - read our tips on clutches for more information. The best mods in our experience for your Altea are a remap especially on a turbo, a fast road camshaft and sports exhaust, with a good air intake.

Remaps offer massive power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful. However a remap on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods.

We've also come across some owners playing with twin charging conversions and making some very high power figures.

Despite the large cost involved adding forced induction to a NASP engine will give large power gains. It is often cheaper to add a supercharger than it is to get a turbo working. With a turbo the power curve is related exponentially to the engine speed making it harder to map.

Superchargers will give a boost which is proportional to engine speed so is easier to map. To cope with forced induction you will usually need to decrease the compression ratio of the engine .

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Many Altea owners uprate the handling of their cars with tuning suspension upgrades as a priority, this will certainly increase your enjoyment of the car.

Fully adjustable suspension allows you to fine tune the handling of you Altea usually benefitting your drive.

We suggest that you fit performance suspension and lower the car by 30mm - 35 mm. Larger drops require arch work - especially on models already equipped with uprated suspension.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

As alloys are lighter they improve performance and they help to cool the brake disks. 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 Altea big 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.

Although some people have installed larger rims we would restrict ourselves to a 16 inch rim size as the maximum.

There is a more updated version of this Seat Altea Tuning article on TorqueCars.com.

For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss Altea options in more detail with our Altea owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Seat 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 Seat. 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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