Tuning the Nissan Rogue

"Thank you for reading this Nissan Rogue tuning guide."

The Rogue is a good project car to try. Plan ahead and research Rogue tuning to spare yourself making the usual tuning slip ups we regularly hear people complain about.

The Nissan Rogue really good project cars and with carefully chosen upgrades like a remap, turbo improvements and camshafts you will certainly improve your driving experience.

TorqueCars will look at Rogue tuning and provide tips on the best upgrades.

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Handling modifications are usually your first port of call for the Rogue.

Good suspension tweaks that usually improve handling for the Rogue include a couple of degrees negative camber and 1-1.5 degrees of toe in or out on the front wheels. Toe in for stability, or Toe out to improve cornering. It would also pay to improve the brakes, by adding larger discs and or higher friction pads..

We would go to a maximum drop of 27mm - 39 mm. on most models. You risk handling compromises if you go lower than this.

Our aim in engine tuning should be to increase peak bhp at the top end.

Sadly with smaller engine sizes you are wasting your time spending money on modifications, so if this applies to you get yourself an engine swap then apply the following mods.

Power mods.

This list of the stages and sports kits are usually fitted by our members, decide how far you want to push your car before you begin.

Getting the correct grade of sports parts for your planned usage of the car is essential. 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:

 Alloy wheels, Lighter flywheel, Sports exhaust, Remap, Panel air filter, Suspension upgrade (drop 27mm - 39 mm.).

Modifying to Stage 2:

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

Modifying to Stage 3:

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

You should keep as much low end power as possible and aim to get a long power band rather than a narrow top end power hike.

In this article we shall give a brief overview to the best mods 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.A fast road camshaft will be one of the best NASP power modifications you can do from a single upgrade to your engine.

The exhaust & intake valve durations play a huge role 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 reflashed ECU for the best performance gains.

You will need to ensure that the engine is not starved of fuel so will need to uprate the fuelling.

If you find you have flat spots and surges after your kits you should check the fuelling and try a higher octane fuel as well. To get sufficient fuel you may need to improve the injectors on your engine.

If you've uprated your fuelling with bigger injectors you will also need to get a bigger fuel pump to supply it.

Intake and Exhaust Tuning.

The next area for modification is the intake and exhaust.  Please note that WE DO NOT RECOMMEND INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car extensively and are finding that the standard air intake has become a limitation.

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 Rogue engines you should just fit a high performance panel air filter preferably made from cotton.

Sports exhausts can help equal out the flow of gases through the engine. But if the exhaust is too large, ie: over 2.5 inches bore, you will lose a great deal of your flow rate and end up sapping power and torque.

Airflow through the head can be dramatically increased with some professional head porting and polishing. These should match and be setup to take into account any other engine mods. Your clutch can fail as the power goes up if it starts to complain and the standard clutches are only ever good for power gains of up to 45%. Fit an upgraded clutch to avoid power losses through the transmission. The best mods we would do for your Rogue are Remapping or piggy back ecu, fast road cam and air intake and exhaust.

Remaps offer big power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful. However a remap on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods.

We've also come across some owners experimenting with twincharged applications and making some seriously high power figures.

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 harder to map.

It is simpler to map a supercharger because the boost is directly proportional to engine speed on a linear curve. Alternatively you could perhaps add water injection to control knock.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

Alloy wheels can help the brakes cool down and are generally less heavy than the steel ones. Further improvements can be made to your cars handling with the addition of track legal slick tire. Please note that although they can look cool on the Rogue 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.

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 Rogue options in more detail with our Rogue owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Nissan 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 Nissan. 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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