Giulia Tuning

"Thank you for reading my Alfa Romeo Giulia tuning guide."

The powertrain choices for the Giulia comprised 2 petrol versions, the 2.9 L F154 twin-turbocharged V6 and 2.0 L GME T4 Multiair turbocharged  and Diesel in the form of the 2.2 L JTDm I4.

All offer great reward when tuned, and handle really well with a few suspension tweaks and upgrades.

We review your Giulia tuning options, and point out the best mods that work. Alfa Romeo Giulias are good project cars and with carefully chosen sports enhancements you can certainly maximise your driving enjoyment.

The Giulia is a good car tuning project to have. We see car enthusiasts wasting money on their Giulia doing the wrong mods and then having to start over. Follow our guides to avoid ruining your car

Tuning tips and articles

Engine tuning Transmission tuning Care care Intake & exhaust mods Improve handling Forums

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

With our pointers your Giulia can make some decent track times and maintain it's reputation reliable daily run around.

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.

Tuning modifications.

Typically these mods are usually carried out by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you start.

Getting the right uprated upgrades for your planned usage of the car is essential. Stage 3 (competition) mods just don't work well on the road making the car difficult to drive.

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Guide to the Best Tuning Mods & Upgrades

  1. Mods that Remove a Restriction

    If the intake or exhaust are restricted in any way this will have an impact on your cars performance, so use an induction kit/filter upgrade and better flowing exhaust whenever your tuning creates a flow restriction.

  2. Mods that Improve Handling

    Braking, Suspension and general alignment of the suspension components is vital for any tuning project even before you start increasing power.

  3. Fit Stronger Parts

    Tuned cars will show up weaknesses, typically in the turbochargers, clutch and internal engine components. Whilst most engines can cope with mild tuning mods, TorqueCars recommend that you upgrade the internal components before these weak spots manifest themselves.

  4. ECU Tunes & Remapping

    While some cars can be easily remapped, others may require piggyback ECU's or aftermarket ECU's but this is the most vital step of your tuning project as it fully releases the power from all of your mods and upgrades. Expect 10-20% on NASP engines and 30-40% on turbocharged units.

  5. More Power Needs More Fuel & Air

    Every tuning project will aim to increase the air supply, but fuel supply is just as vital and will need to match the air the engine can utilise. Fuel to Air ratio is vital so upgrade the fuel pump & injectors. Also you can look to perform head mods (flowing and porting), bigger valves, fast road cams and forced induction upgrades to improve fuel.

Stages of Tune

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

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

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

Peak power is all well and good but for a drivable and fun car you need a wide torque band and perhaps extending the rev range.

In this article we shall give your a good starting base to the best upgrades for your car, but we'd encourage you to spend some time on the site looking into the details of each type of performance modification.Fast road cams offer one of the biggest performance gains for your money as far as a stand alone modified parts goes on a NASP engine.

The exhaust and 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 reflashed ECU for the best performance gains.

When pushing up the power you will need to uprate to the fuelling. More power needs more fuel.

If you find you get flat spots and surges after your uprated parts you should check the fuelling and try a higher octane fuel as well. Uprated injectors will enable you to supply sufficient fuel to the 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.

Breathing mods are usually next up. Air induction kits will only help to boost power if your air intake is struggling! Adding an induction kit to most stock engines will see NONE OF A LOW END POWER GAIN AT ALL. If you have heavily modified your engine and it's need for air INCREASES DRAMATICALLY then an induction kit is the answer and will help remove this restriction.

For most Giulia 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 generally help improve air flow from the engine but do not go too wide or you could will reduce the flow rate. Stick to 1.5 to 2.5 inches as a rule of thumb.

flowed (porting and polishing) 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 Giulia tuning your clutch will start to complain and this should be improved - read our guide on clutches for more information. The best mods we would do for your Giulia 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 chipped ECU on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods. Adding forced induction will see significant power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. Turbos are usually harder to add than a supercharger. Turbos provide boost in increasing proportion to th engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.

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

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Improving the handling for many tuners first priority in your Giulia tuning project.

If you set the toe out to 1 to 2 degrees on the front, and add a tiny bit of negative camber then cornering will radically improve.

We would go to a maximum drop of 23mm - 35 mm on most models. You risk grounding out if you go lower than this.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

Because alloys are lighter they improve performance and they help to cool the brake disks. If you are serious about performance then you will need to carefully choose your tyres - ideally with a track legal slick tyre. We should point out that although they can look cool on the Giulia 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.

For this reason endeavour to keep the overall rolling diameter of the wheel the same as supplied from the factory. In all cases not going over 18 inches.

There is a more updated version of this Alfa Romeo Giulia Tuning article on TorqueCars.com.

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

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