MORE POWER!
With the RS’s visuals re-vamped, this month Jamie turns his attention to freshening up the performance with an inevitable trip to mountune HQ…
The RS’s reinvention continues this month… with even more power! After the stunning new 3M wrap, stylish new Velgen wheels, and aggressive Toyo R888R tyres, I really needed to take the performance to the next level. The handling and braking have been taken care of already with various chassis upgrades, not to mention those super-sticky tyres, so the time was ripe to up the power.
Throughout the year I’ve been making hardware upgrades in readiness for the switch to the next power level, the only thing I needed now was a decent sports cat and the all-important software. But which one to choose? There’re quite a few options on the market for the Mk3 RS now, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience most of them for myself, but for me it had to be mountune’s m400 kit. Yes, I’m becoming something of a mountune fanboy, and with good reason – it’s all great stuff. When you speak to the mountune technicians and engineers you can really see how every aspect of even the smallest component has been meticulously studied, and then developed to maximise its performance potential. And that’s exactly the kind of care and attention I want people to spend on my beloved RS. And, with the hype surrounding reliability issues of the 2.3-litre EcoBoost seemingly never going away I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little bit of niggling doubt at the back of my mind about increasing the power further. So, I asked; ‘Who do I trust the most?’ And the answer; mountune.
So, I booked the car in at their Essex HQ for a mountune sports cat to be fitted – which soon escalated into a full turbo-back exhaust to work with the already-fitted axle-back! – and the much revered m400 calibration. And… it’s fantastic!
I drove mountune’s own demo car about this time last year, and I’d forgotten how good it is. In fact, in the comfort of my own car, and with the extra chassis/handling upgrades I’ve fitted, I’d say it feels even better than I remember!
Power may only be up around 20bhp from the m380 tune, but the power delivery feels much sharper; from 5000rpm onwards it feels like a different car, pulling much harder to the red line. The torque patterns feel very similar to the m380; there’s still that huge kick up the backside low down in the