Citroen C1 Tuning

"Thanks for reading our Citroen C1 tuning tips."

There were 2 engine options and both felt quite lively in this small light chassis.

It shared much with the Toyota Aygo and Peugeot 108

• 1.0 L 1KR-FE I3 (KGB40) 68bhp 93 N⋅m (69 lbf⋅ft) at 3,600 rpm
• 1.2 L EB2DT I3 (PAB40) 82bhp 130 N⋅m (96 lbf⋅ft) at 1,750 rpm

The C1 is a good car tuning project to do. With the right mods your C1 can be transformed into an awesome motor. Don't waste money, do your homework and follow our unbiased guides to each performance upgrade to avoid disappointment.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Many C1 owners uprate the handling of their cars with tuning suspension kits as a priority, this will certainly increase your enjoyment of the car.

Fully adjustable suspension allows you to fine tune the handling of you C1 substantially improving your drive.

Drop the car by as much as 23mm - 45 mm and fit motorsport grade stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

Don't just look at the peak power figures, you need to see the whole torque curve when determining if a mod is right for you C1.

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.

Power mods.

These mods modified upgrades are usually carried out by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you begin.

Getting the best tuning upgrade kits for your planned usage of the car is a time and money saver. Stage 3 motor sport parts just won't work well on the road making the car difficult to drive.

Please watch our introduction Video tutorial to car tuning. Be sure to subscribe and support our new channel.

Modifying to Stage 1:

 Lighter flywheel, Suspension upgrade (drop 23-45mm), Panel air filter, Alloy wheels, Sports exhaust, Remap.

Modifying to Stage 2:

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

Modifying to Stage 3:

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

Your goal when modding the engine should be a nice flat torque output. You don't want all the torque to be at the top end unless you are creating a motor sport car.

The aim of our articles is to give a little insight into the world of customizing modifications and point you in the right direction, our forum is best place to go if you need more detailed advice and tips on your customized car project, the best sport parts and all aspects of modding cars.One of the most cost effective mechanical uprated mods you can do to your NASP engine is to fit a fast road camshaft .

The exhaust and intake durations play a large part in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car difficult to drive in traffic. You'd need to follow a camshaft upgrade with other mods and finish with a remap for the best performance gains.

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

Most power losses, and erratic idling after tuning kits are done can usually be traced to timing or fuelling issues.To get sufficient fuel you may need to upgrade 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.

The next area for modification is the intake and exhaust. Induction kits are only beneficial to boost power if the air intake is restricted! Adding an induction kit to most small engines will see NO 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.

Do not go with the largest exhaust you can buy this will reduce the exhaust flow rate - the best exhausts for power gains are usually between 1.5 to 1.8 inches. It is the shape and material more than the bore size.

Polishing and porting 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 When you tune up your C1 you will find that the standard clutch starts to fail so get an uprated clutch.

The best mods we recommend for your C1 are fast road camshaft, remap, induction and exhaust, suspensionTurbo engines are just pleading to be remapped.

Despite the large cost involved adding forced induction to a NASP engine will give large power gains. It is generally easier to add a supercharger than it is to fit a working turbo. With a turbo the power curve is related exponentially to the engine speed making it more challenging to map.

It is easier to map a supercharger because the boost is directly proportional to engine speed on a linear curve. To cope with forced induction you will usually need to decrease the engine compression ratio .

Alloy wheel upgrades.

The benefits of alloys include lowering your unsprung weight and better brake cooling via the extra air flow they allow.

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 C1, and make a big difference over budget tires.

Please note although they can look cool on the C1 large 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.

If you decided to fit some 15's you would need to fit wheel spacers of around 10mm and obviously longer wheel nuts on the front wheels to maintain the turning circle and prevent fouling the bodywork during turning.

On the rear you'll probably experience that the petrol tank filler pipe is prone to rub on wider wheels. YOU MUST relocate this pipe if there is a risk of rubbing.

The second issue with the rears is that adding spacers will push the wheels into the bodywork (depending on the width you choose), so you can't use spacers on the rear.

Because of this we would advise sticking to a maximum wheel size of 15 inches, although we know some of our members have installed larger rims with no problems.

For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss C1 options in more detail with our C1 owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Citroen 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 Citroen. 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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