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According to Royal Purple, RP ATF has a low coefficient of friction and high film strength to help reduce heat and wear of the transmission internals. When a reported 90 percent of transmission failures result from excessive heat, these attributes are a good thing. In fact, it’s reported in study done by Perma Industries that just a 20F reduction in transmission fluid temperature can improve the life of a transmission by two fold!
While Royal Purple ATF is full compatible and can be added to most transmissions as a top-off, it’s always best to flush the tranny case of its old oil and refill with the new stuff. We have no idea what dark stuff came out of ours, or how old it was.
In the case of the Mazda MPV, the filler for the transmission is at the driver-side back of the engine compartment.
Sometimes fuel additives can help clean the carbon build-up in an engine. Royal Purple’s Max-Clean is reportedly specially formulated to deeply penetrate and clean injectors, carburetors, intake valves and combustion chambers. One bottle will treat up to 20 gallons.
While we put this stuff into the fuel tank, we don’t expect to see significant gains without running the car for several miles first. Any improvement will also depend on how bad the carbon build-up was in the first place. Still, it’s never too soon to at least start the cleaning process since a clean engine leads to a happy car, much like a clean wife leads to a happy home.
#4: Replace the Oxygen sensors
Since replacing the O2 sensors can be costly, we don't expect everyone to run out to the automotive store to pick up new sensors. After all, when these go bad they usually trigger a check engine light anyway. But if you’re particular about a well running car, it’s not a bad idea to change them out. These do go bad and the engine’s ECU relies on their readings to send the proper fuel trims during close-loop, part-throttle operation. A faulty O2 sensor can lead to very poor gas mileage because most vehicles will default to a fuel enrichment mode to protect the engine from a lean-hot condition.
We wanted to start fresh with our Mazda MPV. However, we actually performed this installation prior to the baseline test in order to not only isolate any potential gains to the fluids and plugs, but also because we didn't have the time to perform the full job between dyno pulls.
Two of the O2 sensors were easy and two were a major pain. If you you only wanted to change two sensors, then replace the pre-cat primary sensors to best serve your engine's tuning.
