More performance
So, I’ve gotten some more done on the Grand Marquis. The exhaust is “finished”. It’s not really done, since I think it still needs an electric cutout – but I do have the cutout Y installed. It looks pretty good, overall. I’ll post up some pictures shortly. After driving with it on for a week, I’m happy. It’s quiet in the car at cruise speeds, and reasonably loud when you step on it. The cutout will satisfy the need for serious noise eventually… I’m also getting a little better than 27MPG with the cruise set on 63 MPH. That’s not too bad for a full-sized car with a V8.
Also new this week is the tuner. I got a good deal on a SCT Livewire (about 50% of the full price), which is a customizable tuner and real-time data logger. So, I can do the boy racer “big thing stuck on the dash” as necessary. The cool thing is that the transmission behaves better now. The car winds up to a touch over 6 grand before shifting now (which sounds awesome, in context) and shifts down when I step on it. Man, the downshifts annoyed me before. The upshift points at part-throttle are a little annoying, though. the car wants to stay in first too long. It’d be good with lower gears – say something like a 3.55 or 3.73 – but the 2.5x or whatever are in there just don’t like this setup. Since the programmer just scales a performance tune to whatever tire+gear combo I have and Im a fair distance from performance gears, this is understandable.
To fix the upshifts, we’re looking at either a custome tune (which can be loaded to the livewire) or lower gears. It’d probably cost about the same to get a complete rear from a P71 (cop car) as it would to get a driveability tune and the gears will be more fun. I’m not sure if they’ll be fun enough to trade off the mileage, though. Have to do some research on how gears impact the mileage. I know that the 3.42s in my Wagon were indistinguishable from the stock 2.56s, so maybe I’m worried about nothing…
The Clifford 50.7x remote start / alarm is next. Hopefully within a week or so. And I should really stop neglecting the Chevelle, since Beth‘s tailbone is healing and she’ll probably want to start driving her car again someday soon…
