Strategies to Increase Horsepower in Audi and VW Vehicles Effortlessly
More power.
It’s something just about every driver dreams about.
Thankfully, with the right performance mods, getting more of it for your Audi, VW, or Porsche is well within reach.Let’s uncover some of the best and easiest ways to increase the horsepower of your ride. Along the way, we’ll answer some of the most common questions we get from new Audi & VW drivers, such as:
- How can you increase horsepower on a car, generally speaking?
- Do exhausts increase horsepower, and if so, how?
- Does a cold air intake increase horsepower, and if so, how?
Understanding Horsepower: The Basics
If you already know about horsepower, torque, and heck, even things like the difference between HP and BHP are, then this section isn’t for you. Otherwise, it’s going to help you develop a foundational understanding of why some of the following performance mods can increase horsepower.
One horsepower refers to “33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute” or “the power necessary to lift a total mass of 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute” according to Britannica.
Essentially, HP is just a unit of measurement for quantifying your engine’s ability to perform work over time.
Here’s where it gets interesting. That ability of your engine to perform work over time? You can change it with a couple of performance mods and hacks (heck yeah!)
In other words, if you can impact some of the factors that affect your car’s ability to perform work in the long run, making the engine more efficient, then you may see a bump in horsepower.
Here’s how…
Exploring 3 Effective Strategies for Increasing HP
Here are three key ways you can add more horsepower to your Audi…
1. Cold Air Intakes
Improving airflow to and from your Audi or VW’s engine is kind of like it breathes better.
Cold air intakes deliver higher volumes of cool, dense air to the engine for combustion, meaning that more oxygen is available. Since making power is essentially all about how much air and fuel you can burn, the net result is more power. As a bonus, you get a great engine induction noise, and on some platforms, awesome turbocharger or supercharger sounds.
2. Exhaust Systems
If cold air intake helps your engine breathe in better, performance exhaust systems help it breathe out better.
Most standard stock exhaust systems, even those fitted on sports from automakers like Porsche and Audi, require exhaust gasses to travel through very narrow pipes with lots of bends and restrictive components like super quiet mufflers.
This system of narrow pipes creates backpressure, which in turn forces the engine to work harder to expel exhaust gasses. Remember, horsepower is a measure of your engine’s ability to do work.
So, when you install an aftermarket performance exhaust system, which is designed to minimize backpressure, and therefore minimize work, essentially increasing available power.
Plus, did we mention how great these exhaust systems sound?!
3. ECU Tuning
So far, we’ve talked about two ways to increase engine horsepower by hacking the physics of how your car works and influencing the inflow and outflow of air and exhaust gasses respectively.
ECU tuning tackles another area of performance and horsepower entirely. If cold air intakes and exhaust systems are like breathing in and breathing out, the ECU, or engine control unit, is like the central nervous system and brain in the human body that controls these processes.
By adjusting the ECU, we can optimize air, fuel, spark, and boost for power. The result is greatly improved power, acceleration, and drivability..
Explore More Ways to Customize Your Audi
Whether you’re getting your Audi track-ready or you’re simply looking to add some fun to your daily commutes, we’ve got mods for just about every Audi driver here at Integrated Engineering.
From engine to exhaust to suspension and more, we’ve got you covered.
Check it all out now by shopping our various collections.