Top 5 First Car Mods

Top 5 First Car Mods - Without Sacrificing Daily Durability

Good ideas for the first modification for your car.  These suggested mods future proof you — as they get you ready for adding power and things like that. Equally valuable, they don't turn your car into a track car so that you no longer enjoy driving it on a day to day bases.

1. Tires - they dictate everything: your maximum acceleration, your maximum deceleration, your maximum cornering. Of course you need power in order to get maximum acceleration, but you're not going to get there if you don't have the traction to do it. Tired are the most important modification out there. --- breaking, acceleration, cornering, they change everything. (Watch video - what is the best mod - talk about the math behind this and why tires are so important). Ten times as effective in certain scenarios versus adding power.
2. Brakes - there is a common misconception about brakes. Example: upgrading your brakes means you can stop faster, and you'll have a shorter stopping distance. That's not really the way brakes work as they do not dictate your stopping distance; tires do. If you have brakes, you can slam on them, and the wheels can lock up — that means your brakes have enough force to stop your tires from moving — and that's all they need to be able to do in order for you to have maximum decceleration. At that point your tires become the limiting factor. So if you want good stopping distance you need nice tires. The purpose of brakes is to turn kinetic energy into heat. For example, your car is moving, you hit the brakes, the brake rotor heats up, and as a result your car slows down. In order to improve brakes, one must improve the cooling, or improve how much heat they can retain. This can be done by design, or by the size of the breaks. To illustrate, when traveling down a large hill, a small brake will heat up faster and fail earlier while you're going down that hill. Whilst a larger break will fail later going down that hill if you're just using your disc brakes to slow you down. In like manner, a break with better cooling will fail later compared to a brakes with worst cooling. This can be contributed to the ventilation within it - how it's designed is very important to stopping distances once you get to higher temperatures. So break fade is what you're trying to eliminate by upgrading your brakes. This is especially important if you plan on adding power to your vehicle or if you plan on taking your vehicle to the track where you want that extra heat retention, your larger disc brakes or the better cooling in them so that you can continue to use them and not worry about coming into a corner at 120mph and your brakes fail on you and they have you going straight at that corner.
3. Limited Slip Differential (LSD) - if you have a rear wheel drive vehicle, or a front wheel drive vehicle, this can be very beneficial. The reason being is open differentials send power 50/50. You have a 50/50 torque split. What does that mean? Let's say you're coming into a corner and you lose a little bit of traction with one of those wheels. Well that wheel is spinning and it's not getting much torque sent to it - now the other wheel is not getting much torque sent to it because both of them are sent the same amount of torque in an open differential. But what a limited slip differential, it sends more torque to the wheel that's spinning slower. Example: if you have one wheel on ice, and one wheel on pavement, the one wheel on pavement is going to be spinning slower so the LSD is going to send torque to that wheel. As a result you're going to be able to accelerate better. It must be noted that LSD’s can improve your acceleration coming out of a corner, depending on road surfaces, and then can also get you sideways. So there are some huge benefits to putting in a limited slip differential if your car doesn't yet have one.
4. Updating your final drive ratio - this is really a way to make your car more fun. This is what Subaru did with the 2017 BRZ — they put a 4.3 final drive ratio in it versus the 4.1 that was in it. What does that do? It takes your wheel torque - torque that you're actually applying to the wheel (the force that comes from the wheel that's accelerating you forward), and in every gear it lifts it by that percentage, so 4.3 divided by 4.1 - whatever that is, something like 5 or 6 percent (.30/4.10 = 1.05 _ % More Wheel Torque In Each Gear) ...every gear is going to have that much more force at the wheels. Now at a point this becomes meaningless as you're not changing the torque of your engine nor are you changing the power of your engine. You're just changing your gearing. Essentially you're sacrificing top speed for more wheel torque. So let's say you went from like a 4.1 to a 5.1, so then you might just replace second gear. So 2nd gear might have the exact gearing of 1st gear - at that point its meaningless as you've just eliminated a gear and reduced your top speed. There is a certain point/certain percentage where it's worth doing, and a certain point where you're just eliminating gears and there's no reason to do it. The ideal outcome is to get more wheel torque, which makes it more fun. That's why you'll see performance packages - like on the Mustang you can get a 4.3, a 4.5, or a 4.7. The latter of which you're going to be putting down the most wheel torque and you're going to have easiest time spinning tires and that's what makes these tires fun. Specifically this is more for rear wheel drive cars, but fwd will do the same thing if you change that ratio, you're going to get better wheel torque.
5. Exhaust - factory exhaust seem to be heavier. Even if you're not a fan of having a super loud exhaust, there are still quieter exhaust out there that are significantly lighter than stock exhaust. One of the big benefits of changing to a lighter exhaust is just saving weight, as a lot of OEM exhuast are really heavy so that's a pretty simple thing you can do to reduce some weight from the vehicle. Equally valuable is that you're not Sacraficing the drivability of the vehicle. --- focused on 5 things you can do that aren't going to Sacrafice your core response as far as turning it into a track car. Final drive could lower your top speed as well as make it a little bit louder, as well as the exhaust -- all of these keeping the everyday drive ability of your car the same and just make it more fun to drive. So that's what I think is important for first modifications. They future proof you, they get ready for adding power and things like that, they also don't turn your car into this track car into a track car so that you no longer enjoy driving it on a day to day bases.