Performance and the 206GTI

Well the Peugeot 206GTI comes from the factory with quite good performance for the money. The actual acceleration figures seem to vary a bit depending on who's doing the testing. I've seen anything from 9.0sec 0-100km/h down to around 7.3. Factory claim is 8.4. I think the main thing is that with the car having 170Nm of Torque available from 1700rpm with a peak of 194Nm at 4100rpm then it's always going to be fun.

Then of course people are always going to want more.

Where to go from here?

With the 206GTI there seem to be four things you can try realistically:

• new exhaust
• new air cleaner/induction kit - such as the K&N 57i
• new ECU chip - eg. the SuperChip one
• head porting - as done by L.A.D. Motorsport

Ultimately the whole point of doing this is to allow more air to flow in and out of the engine. A new induction kit ideally allows a shorter and larger flow of air into the engine, and the an exhaust allows a better flow out. A chip allows the engine to understand that it has more air to play with and thus adjust the fuel/air mix to suit to give better performance. One of the side effects is often that this can allow better fuel economy as when the engine isn't being asked to give high power outputs, then it can be more efficient with the fuel.

People claim that the induction kits (K&N and Pipercross) can give an extra 4bhp(around 1.25kw) or about 1% gain. Is this noticable? Dunno. Personally I think that it's not worth it by itself as you get more of a difference in power on hot and cold days. In combination with other things, it's probably worth it. Some people like them because they change the induction sound to be louder and deeper.

One thing to remember is that cool air is more dense. Higher density leads to a high oxygen level in the cylinder. This gives you more power. It's important when looking at induction kits that in fact they allow more cooler air into the engine (eg. by getting the air in front of the engine rather than behind it).

Head porting (read the L.A.D. Motorsport page for more detail) is ultimately about optimising the flow of air into and out of the cylinders. This is by cleaning up the airflow via polishing etc and/or enlarging the inlet and outlets.