MENUTuning the Jeep Compass
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The Compass is a awesome tuning project to have. We see people wasting money on their Compass doing the wrong mods and then having to start over. Follow our guides to avoid making the common mistakes
Handling/Suspension upgrades
Many Compass owners uprate the handling of their cars with modified suspension kits as a priority, this will certainly increase your enjoyment of the car.
We found that most Compass factory suspension setups need tweaking, a few degrees of toe out for cornering or toe in for stability, 0.9 to 1.5, and a little negative camber will radically improve your cornering and handling.
Drop the car by as much as 23mm - 37 mm. and fit modified stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.
Top end power should be your overall aim on the Compass with a nice fat peak torque band.
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.
Engine Tuning.
This list of the stages and performance modifications are usually carried out by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you get going.
Getting the best sports modifications for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 competition upgrades just won't work well on the road making the car difficult to drive.
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How to tune your car
- Improve the handling
Focus on Suspension improvements, such as coilovers and make sure the bushings are in good order and that the alignment is correct. Then focus on improving the brakes, with a big disk brake conversion kit and fast road brake pads.
- Remove restrictions
Focus on the intake and exhaust with filters being the common point of restriction in a tuned car. Intercoolers may also become restrictive on turbo engines so this may also need to be uprated.
- Burn more fuel & air
Increase the fuelling so it matches the air coming into the engine. The ratio is important so you need to improve the fuel pump and injectors, so the head mods, big valve conversions, fast road camshafts and forced induction upgrades extra supply of air is adequately met.
- Test and replace any weak parts
Weak areas are commonly the clutch, the turbocharger and pistons and crankshaft in a highly tuned engine. Makes sure these components will cope with your power aspirations.
- The Tune or Remap
A cars ECU controls the fuel, timing, spark and even the turbo in some cases, so to fully extract your gains you should remap the car last and this will fully release the power. Some cars are easy to map, and others require piggyback ECU's or aftermarket ECU's but this is the most vital step of your tuning project.
Modifying to Stage 1:
Suspension upgrade (drop 23mm - 37 mm.), Remap, Alloy wheels, Sports exhaust, Panel air filter, Lighter flywheel.
Modifying to Stage 2:
Fast road cam, fuel pump upgrades, Power/Sport clutch, high flow fuel injector, Ported and polished head.
Modifying to Stage 3:
Competition cam, Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger), Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves), Sports gearbox, Engine balancing.
Your aim when tuning should be a flat and wide torque range. You want to avoid sending all the power to be at the top end of the rev range unless you are creating a motor sport car.
In this article we shall give a brief overview to the best upgrades for your car, but we'd encourage you to spend some time on the site looking into the details of each type of performance part.One of the biggest mechanical mods you can do to your NASP engine is to fit a fast road camshaft .
The exhaust and intake valve timings play a huge factor in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car awkward 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 uprate to the fuelling. More power needs more fuel.
Most power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after modified mods are done can usually be traced to fuelling or timing issues. To get sufficient fuel you may need to uprate the injectors on your engine.
If you are increasing your fuelling with bigger injectors you will also need to get a bigger fuel pump to supply it.
Intake and Exhaust Tuning.
Now we move on to the intake and exhaust and ensure proper flow through the engine. Please note that WE DO NOT FEEL YOU GET POWER GAINS FROM INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car a lot and are finding that the standard air intake has become a restriction.
Induction kits can work well on turbo engines and larger engines (if supplied with a suitable cold air feed or air box), generally though we'd just recommend for Compass engines you should just fit a high performance panel air filter preferably made from cotton.
Sports exhausts can usually air flow out of the engine but do not go too large or you may end up 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. Your clutch can fail as the power goes up if it starts to fail and the standard clutches are only ever good for power gains of up to 45%. Fit a competition clutch to avoid power loss through the transmission. The best mods we recommend for your Compass are remaps, sports camshafts and induction improvements.
Turbo engines are just crying out to be Remapped. You will see big power gains on most modern turbo engined cars including diesels making a remap one of the most cost effective and big modifications for your money.Adding forced induction will see massive power gains but this is usually too expensive to be cost effective. Superchargers are often easier to add than turbos. Turbos increase power in exponential proportion to rising engine speed and this can make mapping difficult.
It is simpler to map a supercharger because the boost is correlating 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.
The benefits of alloys include reducing your unsprung weight and more efficient brake cooling. Pay attention to your choice of tyres (tires) for your car, a good directional tread pattern tire can really enhance your cars handling. The downside to large alloy wheels on your Compass is that you're altering your final drive ratio and this will have a detrimental effect on performance.
For this reason we would advise sticking to a maximum wheel size of 18 inches, although we know some of our members have gone larger than this with no problems.
For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss Compass options in more detail with our Compass owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Jeep 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.
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