Tuning the Chevrolet Impala

"Cheers for reading my Chevrolet Impala tuning guide."

The Impala is a good car tuning project to fill your spare time. If you do your planning then you can create an awesome Impala but don't be fooled there are lots of competition inspired modifications out there that will simply not suit it read our unbiased guides first.

We provide a guide to Impala tuning and provide tips on the optimum modifications for your car. Chevrolet Impalas provide a fun base for your project and with the best uprated parts you can really maximize your driving fun.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

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

Adding slight negative camber on the fronts and a few degrees of toe in to improve stability or toe out for better cornering, will substantially improve your Impala in handling and cornering.

Drop the car by as much as 24mm - 42 mm. and fit sports stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

A nice wide torque band and sweet spot of peak power at one third of your RPM range is optimum.

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 sports modifications are usually installed by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you get going.

Getting the best performance modifications for your planned usage of the car is a time and money saver. Stage 3 motor sport parts just don't work well on the road difficult in stop start traffic.

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Modifying to Stage 1:

 Suspension upgrade (drop 24mm - 42 mm.), Lighter flywheel, Sports exhaust, Alloy wheels, Panel air filter, Remap.

Modifying to Stage 2:

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

Modifying to Stage 3:

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

Peak power is good on competition cars but for a drivable and fun car you need a long torque band and perhaps extending the rev range.

The whole point of our hints is to give a brief overview of modifying mods and point you in the right direction, our forum is the place to go for detailed advice and tips on your tuning project, the best motorsport modifications and all aspects of modding cars.One of the best mechanical modifications you can do on your NASP engine is to fit a fast road camshaft .

The intake and exhaust flow play a major role 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 camshaft upgrade with other mods and finish with a performance chip to fully release the power gain.

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

Frequently power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after performance modifications are done can usually be traced to timing or fuelling issues. To get sufficient fuel you may need to uprate the injectors on your 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.

Now we move on to the intake and exhaust and ensure proper flow through the engine. Induction kits are only beneficial to add performance if your cars air intake is restricted! Adding an induction kit to most low power 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.

Maximum power gains come from a full induction kit with a cold air feed on heavily tuned engines, this can be sited within an air box but a panel filter should suffice for most applications. TorqueCars suggest you use a panel air filter as these are easy to clean and maintain and generally perform better than paper ones.

Sports exhausts generally help improve air flow out of the engine but avoid an exhaust that is too large or you could will reduce the flow rate. Stick to 1.5 to 2.5 inches as a rule of thumb.

Getting a professionally flowed (ported and polished) head with larger valves can fully release the engines power. In nearly all cases of Impala tuning your clutch will start to complain and this needs to be uprated - read our overview on clutches for more information. The best mods in our opinion for your Impala are fast road camshaft, remap, induction and exhaust, suspension.

NASP engines do not achieve big power gains if you remap them, unless you have done extensive modifications. With turbocharged engines this is another story. A remapped turbo will give massive power gains and take full advantage of the strength of the block.

We've also come across some owners experimenting with twincharging conversions and making some impressively high power hikes.

Despite the large cost involved adding forced induction to a NASP engine will give large power gains. Turbos are often harder to add than a supercharger. With a turbo the boost curve is related exponentially to the engine speed making it difficult to map fuelling with.

It is more straightforward to map a supercharger because the boost is proportional to engine speed on a linear curve. Decreasing the engines compression ratio will allow you to add forced induction, water injection may also help prevent detonation.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

As alloy wheels are less heavy they improve performance and they can help to cool the brake disks. We can't go into too much detail here about tires but they are how the car puts the power down on the road so are a critical choice. track legal slick tires work well on Impala, and make a big difference over budget tires. Large Impala alloys can decrease performance. If you get big alloys you will be changing your final drive ratio.

Although some people have gone larger than this without problems we would stick to a 16 inch rim size as the maximum.

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

Please help us improve these tips by sending us your feedback in the comments box below.

We love to hear what our visitors have got up to and which mods work best for them on each model of car. Comments are used to improve the accuracy of these articles which are continually updated.

This article was written by Waynne Smith on TorqueCars, and I appreciate your feedback and suggestions. This entry was filed under Chevrolet. You can leave a response below or join TorqueCars forum to discuss this article and car modification in detail with our members.

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