WAKING UP A TUNDRA

A TRIFECTA OF PERFORMANCE PARTS FOR A 5.7L TOYOTA

A Trifecta of Performance Parts for a 5.7L Toyota

WHEN IT COMES to owning any kind of vehicle, having it perform its best as efficiently as possible is important. Making a vehicle breathe better is something that you and a buddy can do in an afternoon or a weekend day, even if you’re not particularly mechanically inclined. If you can turn some wrenches and screwdrivers, these parts can be installed in your driveway. Some things are best left to the professionals, but any novice DIYER can install the parts used in this article.

We will show you some of the basic steps to add a Gibson cat-back exhaust, AIRAID intake and a Hypertech Interceptor tuner. For our project truck, we went with a ’15 Toyota Tundra TRD Pro Crewmax. Our truck already had a 7-inch lift kit and 37-inch-tall tires installed (check out “Tall Order,” pg. 34, December 2016 to see how we installed the lift), so we didn’t have to jack up the truck to get to the exhaust. You might not have to either if you have a stock truck, but it could help when removing the rear sections.

Because our project truck is a TRD Pro model, it came with a factory TRD dual exhaust, so we opted to replace it with a better-flowing, stainless dual exhaust from Gibson (P/N 67501, $812). To increase the air coming into the motor, we replaced the restrictive stock air box with an AIRAID Performance intake (P/N 510-213, $355), which came with a cleanable, oil-able filter. To smooth out all of the gear shift points, which will increase your overall mpg and recalibrate the factory computer to perform better, we installed a Hypertech Interceptor tuner (P/N 706001, $379). It’s a plug-and-play unit that requires zero future calibration. All that we had to do was connect the tuner to our home computer and update it with the correct map. For us that was the map for the AIRAID intake, but the tuner provides multiple options for a variety of intakes. If you install the tuner without replacing the intake, you don’t have to make any updates before installation. Hypertech also offers a spedocorrector that will recalibrate the speedometer if you run larger-than-stock tires like our project truck. It’s also a plug-and-play upgrade.

Check out the next few pages to see how simple it is to install these parts to make your Tundra perform a little better and sound a lot meaner.