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| Greddy’s TiC exhaust is routed straighter than stock and has a 80mm dimater for free flow. It is also very light, saving about 30 lbs over the stock system |
Next up was a cat back exhaust. Now just about every SoCal EVO sports some sort of cat back exhaust, in fact I can’t remember the last time I saw an EVO with a stock exhaust! As we are going to eventually go quite a ways in the modification path for our IX we wanted a large diameter exhaust. Since we also plan on doing track events and our EVO is being built for go with no show, we also wanted to save some weight as the EVO is a pretty porky machine and the stock exhausts weigh a ton. This lead us to the Greddy TiC exhaust.
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| The Greddy TiC exhaust takes a 90 degree bend out of the system right here, this helps flow quite a bit |
The TiC features big 80mm tubing, one of the only non special order exhausts available in the USA to have such a large diameter. The EVO TiC is designed with minimal bends for less backpressure and better exhaust velocity. The TiC is also light, featuring thinwall all stainless steel construction, hollow stainless hangers and pressed thin but strong stainless flanges with a titanium tip. The TiC features extremely low backpressure, straight though perforated core mufflers packed with Greddy’s unique composite cube packing. The TiC is over 20 lbs lighter than the stock exhaust. What we found amazing is that despite the exhausts racing inspired straight though construction and baffle free mufflers, it was very quiet, nearly as quiet as the stock muffler, even with the butt plug additional silencer removed. On the dyno we found that the TiC gave us 8 hp on the top end boosting our output to 276 whp@ 7050 rpm. The exhaust only gave us more power on top leading us to speculate that the major restrictions in the exhaust system lie forward of the cat.
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| The Greddy Ti C exhaust gave us nearly 8 whp on the top end |
Next up was XS Engineering’s intercooler hard pipe kit. The kit replaces the restrictive stock piping with smoothly mandrel bent polished aluminum piping. The kit works with both the stock and XS’s upgraded front mount intercooler. With the XS kit, you have to run a smaller battery or do what we did, relocate the battery to the trunk. Relocating the battery allows XS to make a hardpipe kit with smoother bends for less turbulence in the piping. It is apparent that XS took the time to carefully shape and route the piping to reduce the overall amount of bends and to keep the flow high without simply resorting to larger tubing and a higher internal volume which can result in poorer throttle response and more turbo lag.
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| XS Engineering’s IC hard pipe kit is made of polished mandrel bent aluminum with silicone couplers |
Although the hardpipe kit installed easily, we did have to remove our EVO’s front fascia which is fortunately a pretty easy job. It’s almost as if the EVO was designed to have its front bumper easily removable. XS assured us that we would be pleased with the power gains from this simple kit but we were skeptical, we didn’t think that the stock IC plumbing was that restrictive looking. A trip to the dyno yielded some surprising results. The XS piping gave us a gain of 7 whp for a new high of 284 whp @ 6800 rpm. The power gains were mostly across the board with the low end response being improved. Peak gains of over 12whp were seen past the power peak. What a pleasant surprise this was.
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| The XS Engineering hard pipe kit relocates the wastegate hose from the compressor housing to past the intercooler up towards the throttle body. You can see the small blue hose in this picture–this helps improve boost response. |
