Q&A for How to Max Your Car's Horsepower

You can upgrade fuel. Add a performance fuel pump, larger injectors, and a larger fuel rail and return line. If you really want to spend a lot of money and make your car fast, build a high compression motor, or a stroker motor.

Yes it does. Depending on the vehicle you drive, however, it can also make you gas mileage a little bit poorer.

A fair amount, but you would need a new exhaust / an intercooler system / boost gauge; a new air fuel ratio gauge; and a new tune on your ECU.

A 3-cylinder? It's likely the air intake won't be optimized for performance. Here's an idea, though: use some tubing or ducting so that the engine will only suck in air form outside. A simple duct from the air intake to the front grille would help. Try to make it as difficult as possible for the air to get in anywhere else other than straight from the grille (or wherever you duct air from), as you only want the engine sucking in air from the outside world.

Aluminum heads would provide your engine with a massive weight loss, and if machined properly, you'd see substantial gains in power.

This is the brain of the engine. It is best to let an expert on a rolling road set up your car if you wish to gain more power. This is best done when you have purchased a larger diameter exhaust system together with a cold air intake filter to maximize power output.

No. Properly sized blowers have an air-relief valve to dump excess pressure at a preset number. Headers would not affect it at all because of this excess pressure.

Install a turbo charger or a super charger. Decreasing weight will result in a big difference, and using higher-quality fuel is recommended, too.

Yes, it will give extra HP, but not that much.

You should add a new Garrett turbocharger, reduce weight, and make sure that you have high-performance air filters. Don't buy the cheap stuff.

Induction kit removes excess weight, and good service normally give you a good few BHP. Use Redex, that cleans all the crap out the fuel system and restores some lost power.

Add a supercharger kit and a BMW-recommend airflow and exhaust system. Max increase of HP is 15 - 30.

Absolutely, yes. Make sure you fit legal recommended parts otherwise it will hurt your car badly.

Probably around 600 bhp on stock parts as well, but just don't launch it or drive it super hard. Maybe 350-400 whp to be safe enough. Don't depend on it.

Of course! But if you're talking about adding a second engine, that won't be a good idea, because they weight a lot. You can try chipping, adding performance parts, installing methanol injection, etc. There are lots of things that will increase your performance without a second engine.

Add power and reduce weight. There are some very cheap and simple options you can employ, and many tutorials online.

Some things you can do are decrease vehicle weight, add shock absorbers and/or cold air intake, supercharge/turbocharge, add a nitro kit, and use high-performance tires.

Add a supercharger that gives you 30 psi. It will give to more than enough power but make sure you engine can handle it or it may overheat.

Probably not, if you did somehow make it work, it probably wouldn't fit under your hood and I'm not truly certain you would see a gain or a gain worth all that cost and work. Generally speaking, turbos work best on high revving small engines, superchargers on v8s. You could supercharge a 4 cylinder but a it probably would require a new hood if you can make it fit. superchargers run from belts and can steal tens of horsepower. A 4 cylinder cant really afford to give up horsepower to make horsepower. A v8 on the other hand generally has a lower rpm range (generally not desirable for a turbo) large engine bay and the engine itself can handle losing 20-50 horsepower for the gains.

Assume it's not without lots of modification. A bit of online searching can provide this information via people who have tried. See if you can figure out company engine names and search for those. In most cases though, the stock internals of an engine cannot handle much more PSI than stock without replacing lots of parts, like swapping out for forged pistons for example. There are, of course, notable exceptions like the older supra motors which can apparently take lots of boost with minimal engine work.

This isn't something you'd want to do yourself. Speak to a local tuner about increasing your performance.

You could consider dropping in an Evo engine. This would give around 350bhp with aftermarket ECU and exhaust.

It all depends on the engine specifications. You can use any kind of transmission but your best bet is to use the transmission that goes with the engine you're wanting to use. Talk to an auto mechanic for specialized advice suited to your vehicle.