The 2023 Nissan Z is here with 400hp, but of course you need more! Here are the top 5 mods that will make your Nissan Z faster. Tuning the Nissan Z will make it more respsonsive and allow you to properly take advantage of the supporting mods discussed in this video. Sporting a twin turbo 3.0L V6 VR30DDTT, the new Z cribs its engine directly from the Infiniti Q50. The popular tuner pieces that make 450-500whp (wheel horsepower) in the Infiniti will work in the Z.
We’re kind of living in the golden age of sports cars where 400 horsepower in the brand new nissan z sounds like a lot and it is but if you’re like me it’s not enough and you’re going to want to mod it one of the big differences between the new z and the 370z of course is the engine it’s the v6 twin turbo the vr 30 ddt and because it’s a turbo it’s going to be a lot
Easier to get power out of it so let’s talk about the five things that you need to do to get additional power out of it i confirmed with nissan that the vr30 engine is exactly the same one used in the q50 it’s probably even got the same ecu it’s a direct transplant so we should be able to take the lessons that have been learned from the q50 and apply them directly
To the z and so with that in mind i’ve done a bit of research and i’ve discovered what people are commonly doing to make about 450 horsepower or a little bit more i just drove the new nissan z and i compared it to my supra and i’ve got some more clarified thoughts i want to share with you a little bit later in this video so an engine of course is basically just a
Big air pump we get air in the front we add fuel at the cylinder we combust it that makes a bunch of power and torque and it goes out the back as exhaust so we want to basically free up that flow so we’re getting more air in so we can burn more fuel and get the exhaust out faster let’s start at the front of the car with the intakes so most people are going to add
An intake to their vehicle and remember all this kind of works as a system because if you’ve got a bottleneck in the system that is going to restrict your power so you want to have the air coming in combust it and get it out as quickly as possible so you sort of need to do all these things in order to get good power so a lot of people have been using ams intakes
Which i can say is a pretty good brand i know people have been using it on their supra and of course it’s a v6 you’ve got two intakes and that’s going to add a little bit to the cost of the thing and then you want to get the exhaust out more quickly so the most important thing you can probably do is use a down pipe or actually two downpipes in the case of the vr30
Engine because of course it’s a v6 now as i understand it there are four cats along these two pipes you’ve got a primary cat and a secondary cat and as i understand it there’s two kinds of downpipes you can get one that just remove one of the cat one that removes both of the cats of course these are both for off-road use only so i’m just talking about hypotheticals
Here but once you’ve got the air in through the intakes it’s combusted you’re getting it out with these down pipes that’s going to free up your exhaust it’s basically going to increase the exhaust velocity that you’re getting and you’re not going to have that blockage of the catalytic converters and then another thing you can do of course is add an exhaust in as
Well to further free up the the airflow now i don’t know how restrictive the exhaust is going to be on the new z i haven’t seen any tests on it i don’t think any really anybody really has one in their hands yet but we’re going to find out pretty soon and there’s one thing to note there is a difference between the automatic and the manual z and that has to do with
The amount of noise that it generates good power but it is a pretty good sounding engine so now that you got these basic things in place what you want to do is tie it all together with a tune the way the ecu is tuned from the factory is designed to work with stock parameters and produce stock power and stock emissions the goal in getting more power of course is to
Be able to burn a little bit more fuel to create more power so you need to alter the programming in order to take advantage of these hardware modifications that you’ve done and there’s two basic kinds of tunes there is a piggyback style tune and then there is a flash tune so let’s talk about what a piggyback tune is first that is essentially a little device that
Is going to plug into your wiring harness and what it’s going to do is it’s going to intercept various signals coming from the engine and it’s going to alter those signals before sending them back to the ecu so you’re essentially fooling the engine into making more power by doing things like producing more boost pressure advancing the spark and so forth and i’m
Not a tuner so i can’t really speak to the specifics of these kinds of things but when you’ve got a tune like that you’re going to have some kind of limitations you’re not going to be able to do a lot of custom tuning and you’re not going to be able to take full advantage of the hardware that you have but it is going to be less expensive and these are kind of off
The shelf things and typically you can get it shipped to you in a day or two plug it in start going and a lot of people are going to be pretty happy with the type of power they’re making from that and in fact you can just do a flash tune alone with no hardware modifications at all without adding anything to the car and generally speaking you’re going to make a
Little bit more power for next to nothing the second main kind of tune is something called a flash tune and that is where you actually alter the programming of the ecu so you’re changing the values in the actual computer itself the ecu that controls your vehicle and so this is a little bit more desirable because you’re going to be able to work with a tuner to get
A customized tune that’s going to be specific to the bolt-ons that you added you’re going to have just a lot more ability to customize things you’re going to have a lot more ability to make things exactly the way you want and typically produce a little bit more power too now this is going to be more expensive to do but i have verified that in fact you can tune
The vr30 platform with at least something called ecutec their british company again this video is not sponsored and you will need to generally speaking work with a tuner that has purchased the ecutec product and work with them to get a tune loaded onto your vehicle and get it set up exactly the way you want now with a flash tune you’re typically going to have
A couple of different tunes that you can switch between using your phone and perhaps also some other parameters too for example on this you would be able to change the amount of verbal these tunes you can also update them over the air typically you’re going to work with a tuner and they can send you a tune that you’re going to load up using your personal laptop
So we talked about four things so far we talked about the air intakes we’ve talked about down pipe we’ve talked about an exhaust and we talked about a tune now there’s a fifth thing that you can do which is going to make the overall system work a little bit better and that is to swap out the heat exchanger which is up front the heat exchanger is going to take
Heat out of the system it’s a heat exchanger and in order to reduce the overall temperature of the entire system and make the cards a little bit more stable especially in hot weather or if you’re doing poles you can upgrade that heat exchanger so again i verified with nissan that this does have essentially the same heat exchanger that it does on the q50 so it’s
A pretty small heat exchanger on that vehicle and i looked at it on the z and so if you upgrade that again using something like ams there’s probably a bunch of other manufacturers too you’re going to be able to reduce the overall system heat which is going to be beneficial to making power so doing all those things should give you somewhere in the range of 400 to
500 horsepower i believe it’s going to cost you a couple of grand in parts and of course there’s going to be some labor to install it now if you want to go much bigger power you’re going to have to upgrade your turbos and someone like pure they’ve got systems which i think started around 3 600 and go to about 45 4800 for a pair of turbos you can need two of them
Of course then you can start making some much bigger power by doing that and of course at that point you’re probably going to want to upgrade a whole bunch of other things too when you sort of get into a cascade of pretty expensive mods so that’s definitely one way to go but let’s talk about for a second my thoughts on the supra versus the z because the last video
Which i’m going to link down here where i compared them drove them back to back in fact that was the first one that video generated a lot of comments so first up you need to understand that i shot that video with nissan’s vehicle they were very generous to lend me the car they allowed me to drive the car they invited me down to do that in san diego and i actually
Sprung the comparison on them at the last minute so thank you very much nissan for letting me actually do the car comparison so with that said i want to clarify some of my thoughts on the vehicle so one of the big comments that i got was that i was biased because i was comparing a 40 000 vehicle against a 50 52 000 vehicle but i actually stand by my point that i
Think the z for forty thousand dollars still wins because you can’t get the supra at forty thousand dollars for forty four thousand dollars to get the two liter which is kind of weak sauce compared to what you get in the z so was it a perfect comparison absolutely not but again i stand by my point forty thousand dollars is a huge value and i think the car really
Speaks to a lot of enthusiasts they’re going to sell a lot more z’s than they are supras they’ve sold these in the tens of thousands in terms of the entire z production from the 240 starting in 1969 up until now they’ve sold i think about 1.3 million so it is a much more popular car on balance the super has always been a more expensive vehicle so it’s sort of the
Position of it is you’ve got cars that are around the 30 000 level you’ve got the miata then you’ve got the brz gr86 twins then you’ve got the the z and the supra kind of in the middle and above that you’ve got the corvette so that’s kind of where its place is there are two competing cars for the money which have more power for less money and of course that is the
Camaro with the zl1 package with the v8 and also the mustang gt so the entry point is forty thousand dollars for the sport and that has cloth seats there’s another leather interior so the next step up is the performance version and you get a couple of significant things in the performance department for that namely you get a limited slip differential and you get a
Much bigger brakes front and rear but you do get the same engine it’s going up ten thousand dollars and i don’t think that’s as good a value nearly as forty thousand dollars obviously because to get into a 2022 supra the premium the 3.0 not the premium just the 3.0 starts at about 51 52 dollars so we’re talking about just now a two thousand dollar difference between
The two cars so it’s not as good a value when you get up to that fifty thousand dollar level let me just put that out there another thing i wanna talk about is the weight difference between these two vehicles so the z comes in at 35 to 3 600 pounds roughly depending on trim you can expect the performance automatic is going to be about 3 600 toyota quotes this at
3 400 but i know from weighing the vehicle with a quarter tank it weighs just a little over 33 like 33.25 so there is a pretty significant weight difference we’re talking about almost 300 pounds probably in real life until someone weighs the z maybe it does weigh less than 3600 but that’s what we know right now two to three hundred pounds is pretty significant now
I also drove the manual transmission and of course there is no manual for this and that kind of sucks at launch and obviously toyota has seen what’s going on and decided to come out with a manual transmission but this has the zf8hp transmission which is the most popular transmission in the world as i understand it and this thing can handle a ton of torque i don’t
Know what the z transmission drives like i wasn’t able to drive the automatic version so that wasn’t really a fair comparison from a back to back perspective also a couple other things with this vehicle compared to that one this obviously has after-market wheels and tires on there that wasn’t much of a factor because i wasn’t really able to do a lot of performance
Driving i think the z is a little bit more of a grand tour a little bit more laid back this is a little bit more knife edge i guess you could say this is a little bit more of that samurai sword ready to slice and dice the roads now this has a more refined overall feel i think the materials in the cabin are better the cabin is much tighter the z feels more airy
Definitely but this has a much stiffer body structure this car feels a lot more structurally kind of sound and also there’s a lot more storage space in the back of the car too so it wasn’t the perfect comparison yeah this is a 2020 compared to a 2023 this has for that test i tuned this to 2022 horsepower levels which is 382 horsepower but my butt dyno tells me
That this car is actually quicker and i just want to point out how strange the internet is when in 2019 bmw was such a dirty word with this car because yeah this is almost entirely bmw components in fact it’s built in grass austria the z is obviously japanese and it’s built in japan but somehow that all got thrown out the window with the z comparison now people
Say that bmw isn’t such a bad thing so the internet is kind of a weird place and there’s obviously a lot more mods that you can do to your z such as wheels and tires spring suspension body kits it all really depends on how you want to customize your z and i know people are going to go nuts and start doing that and that is super awesome i hope that nissan sells a
Ton of these things and if you want to see my back-to-back comparison it was the very first one click right over here thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
Want A Fast Nissan Z? These Are All The Mods You Need – Affordable Sports Cars By RevMatchTV
