MENUTuning the Vauxhall Vivaro Life
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The Vivaro is a awesome van tuning project to carry out. The key to Vivaro tuning is balancing power and reliability - a lot of money can be wasted if you do it wrong.
The Vauxhall Vivaro and Vivaro Life are popular tuning projects and with a few sensible tuning upgrades like remapping, turbo kits and camshafts you will definitely maximise your driving opportunities.
We shall review Vivaro tuning and point out the best mods that work.
Our aim in Vivaro engine tuning should be to increase peak power and Torque 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.
The following tuning mods are usually fitted by our members, decide how far you wish to go in your tuning project before you begin.
Getting the right performance parts for your planned usage of the car is vital. Stage 3 motor sport mods just don't work well on the road hard to control in slow traffic.
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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:
Alloy wheels, Panel air filter, Remap, Sports exhaust, Suspension upgrade, Lighter flywheel.
Modifying to Stage 2:
Ported and polished head, Power/Sport clutch, high flow fuel injector, fuel pump upgrades, Fast road cam.
Modifying to Stage 3:
Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger), Competition cam, Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves), Sports gearbox, Engine balancing.
Your aims when tuning should be a wide torque band. You want to avoid sending all the torque to be at the top end of the rev range unless you are creating a motor sport car.
In this article we shall give an overview and introduction to the best modifications for your car, but we'd encourage you to spend some time on the site looking into the details of each type of performance modification.Fast road cams offer one of the biggest power gains for your money as far as a bolt on modifications goes on a NASP engine.
It maximises the intake and exhaust flow and pushes up the power if done right. Ideally you'd add other mods and finish up with a performance chip. We'd also caution you not to go with a competition cam as this affects the engines idling and general town driving characteristics.
Don't forget to increase the fuelling when you are increasing the power - it makes the car more thirsty.
Most power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after kits are done can usually be traced to fuel delivery or timing issues. 
Uprated injectors will enable you to supply sufficient fuel to the 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. 
Please note that WE DO NOT FIND IMPROVEMENTS WITH INDUCTION KITS, unless you have tuned your car extensively and are finding that the standard air intake has become limited.
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 performance 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 can usually air flow from the engine but do not go too big or you could will reduce the flow rate. Stick to 1.5 to 2.5 inches as a rule of thumb.
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. When you start tuning your Vivaro you will reach a point that the standard clutch starts to fail so get an uprated clutch. The best mods in our opinion for your Vivaro are a remap especially on a turbo, a fast road camshaft and sports exhaust, with a good air intake.
Remaps offer massive 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 seen some tuners toying with twincharging conversions and making some seriously high power gains.
Despite the large cost involved adding forced induction to a NASP engine will give large power gains. Turbos are usually harder to add than a supercharger. It is harder to map a turbo as the boost increases exponentially with revs.
Superchargers will give a boost which is directly proportional to engine speed so is simpler. 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 a lower unsprung weight and more efficient brake cooling. Don't forget that your choice of rubber greatly affects your cars grip and handling. It is not worth compromising performance with cheap tyres when you can buy track legal slick performance tires.Large Vivaro alloys can decrease performance. If you get big alloys you will be changing your final drive ratio.
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 Vivaro options in more detail with our Vivaro owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Vauxhall 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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