Many claims are being made about the filter elements in CAIs, AIRs and as a replacement for filters in stock air intakes.
The idea of this topic is to show with real life experiences what is true ad what might be imagination.
What prompted the topic is some extreme experience:
Recently having had an Audi 2.4 V6 on the chassis dyno that was converted to a supercharged engine we had some rather extreme experience. Stock power is 170bhp and 230 Nm of torque.
The re-mapping procedure is rather straight forward as it can be done live via an emulator. a Peak power increase of about 25bhp was soon recorded. And ended finally at 197bhp. Playing with it for hours it did not change. The brick wall was hit at 197bhp.
The customer brought a very nice supercharger conversion with a green cotton airbox.
It looks in the picture much smaller than it is
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]We knew that the conversion was able to give a lot more power and that the Green Cotton filter element is not that great. But how bad it was we only found out when removing it.
Unfortunately the customer was not happy to having taken pictures of his conversion. So, we have to stick to the filter pics only
After opening the box it became clear:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]We then took one of the filters of our choice:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]The big surprise was that the peak power immediately jumped from 197bhp to 223bhp!
Not only that an instant 26bhp were gained, but also the mapping window was now wide open and the final result of the day was 241bhp, which was up a whopping 44bhp on the Green cotton filter and Torque outpunt was 206Nm.
The comment of the customer was:"Why did I buy an expensive Green cotton filter when a much cheaper open twin cone is doing that much better?"
Well, I don't know!