So does anybody know anything about the intakes from Mina Gallery I bought one and installed it but I've been watching a video from racer 69 on YouTube but he claims that the original intake is actually better and gain more horsepower after he did a couple of Dino Tunes he's has the video posted I'm warning if anyone can back this up because he said he has the proof that the original intake is better any thoughts please let me know if I could take my Mina Gallery one off and put back the stock one

 

I don't have proof, but I can tell you that when I went back to stock, the power delivery felt smoother.

 

Metal intake piping is not a good idea, you are raising intake air temps into an engine that already easily overheats. Over the years through many discussions, the general consensus is that the stock air intake box/tubes provide the best air for this motor.

 

A few years ago I put a TCP (Twin Cities Performance) intake kit on my 2010 XFR - similar to the Mina kit but less metal and more silicon tubing - and it made zero difference as far as I could tell. It was impossible to fit properly even after many hours of fiddling with it with big kinks in the main silicon tubes such that the tube diameter was narrowed a lot which possibly had a detrimental effect on air flow and hence performance. I took it off after a few months and put the stock setup back on, again no noticeable difference in performance.
TCP have been out of business for some time now.

 

This argument has been going on for a long time on many different threads, but I wish people would stop referring to that one Youtube video as definitive proof that they "reduce performance", as it certainly wasn't enough to sway me - I've noticed a considerable difference (mesaurable at +3psi on my boost guage) in swapping from OEM intake (to get the car through California Smog tests) to custom TCP style with cone filters (which is obviously more than just swapping the pipe with OEM air boxes) and - crucially - resetting the ECU's stored values with my Autel tool before running with the new intake, which I suspect the guys in the video didn't do - it will take time for the ECU to relearn otherwise.

I'll acknowledge I've done a fair bit with heat management of the intake and air, which likely helps.

Also, if these modified intake pipes are so bad, and the OEM intake is so great, why is it that nobody can explain to me why tuners/racers including JLR SVO themselves use them?

 

Fair argument Dave, I consider you an expert on the 5.0 engine given your history. Is it fair to say that aftermarket intakes with cone filters "might" reduce performance if the car has the factory tune? The benefits of a new intake can only be realized if the engine is tuned to adjust for the additional air coming in?

 

Honestly, tune aside I think aftermarket intake with cone filters could well reduce performance if you don't put decent effort into shielding the cone filters from the heatsoak of the engine bay (I still have some work to do in this regard). The OEM intake does a reasonable job of shielding the intake from the heat, but it also could do a better job in the amount of air it gets to the filters, especially as these "cold" air feeds aren't all that cold when wrapped around coolant pipes etc. IMHO getting as much cold air to the filters as possible is the key here, and even if I went back to stock setup I'd retain the additional cold air feeds I've added to the front bumper, even if these might only make a difference when moving at speed. I'm always amazed when I see people running open cone air fliters (on a wide variety of engines) sucking in all that hot air from under the engine and quite probably losing power over stock.

In terms of tune, I'm still running the stock tune and I'm throwing lean codes with my intake/cone filters and a ported supercharger with a pulley because I'm hitting the limits of the factory fuel map. I'm not overly concerned about this as this engine seems to run pretty rich generally if the state of my tailpipes are anything to go by, but I don't think it's losing me power over stock - there's clearly just a lot more power to be had, and a tune is high up the list of priorities for me for obvious reasons.

However, in terms of the aftermarket Mina-style intake pipe on it's own, I still noticed a palpable difference using my own DIY setup, but I acknowledge that most of this setup was actually silicone tubing (which does a pretty good job of insulating heat as it happens) and not metal, which obviously is going to do a pretty good job of heating the air before it even gets to the supercharger. Arguments abound on whether the metal intake pipe matters or not when you're actually moving and drawing air through the intake at a decent rate - personally if I was running a Mina intake I'd get it ceramic coated to minimize heatsoak, but I still find the idea that one of these pipes would lose you power absurd.

These were the considerations of the Jaguar engineers when designing the OEM intake pipe:

• NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness - up until cars like the F-Type R and the Project 8, your average Jaguar buyer did not want to hear supercharger whine.)
• Cost of manufacture
• Required durability (they didn't get this one right given how many split at the throttlebody end due to the heat)
• No really, NVH - the old guy replacing his XJ will think the new one is broken if he can hear the whine
• Space for other components/design considerations
• Probably other things I haven't thought of
• Performance

Notice how low down the list "performance" is. If they have to sacrifice 10bhp by focusing on the acoustic design of the pipe in order to minimize supercharger whine ("Grace, pace, space"), they're going to do it.

If you're tuning for performance, then you don't care about any of that (and in a lot of cases, might even prefer to hear more supercharger whine - I certainly do). Maybe you won't get that much more power, but anybody saying that you're guaranteed to lose power unless you stay stock (which seems to be something a lot of people bandy about without really knowing for sure) either needs to bring the evidence or stop being quite so authoritative about it.

At this point, given the fact that JLR SVO and other tuners run that style of intake to apparently great success, even if someone has a dyno runs showing that an aftermarket pipe loses you power, I'm going to assume that they either didn't reset the ECU parameters between swapping pipes, or didn't do enough to protect the intake air charge from heatsoak, or if the car is running a tune that they just don't know how to tune for the altered intake - neither of which invalidate the idea of using one of these aftermarket intakes - you've just got to do it properly.

Maybe you have to run a tune to get more power. But I don't for one second buy the idea that you'll lose it.

 

It's not the fuel map causing a CEL, it's a MAF adapters. If the dia of the adapters are diffrent from a stock ones - the MAFs should be recalibrated (otherwise they will give false reading causing a lean/rich conditions)

 

Well stated, can't argue with that!

 

Diameters of MAF adapters are broadly the same as stock (+/- 1mm, maybe even less). I ran these adapters without throwing codes for a good year on the stock map, it was only once I swapped the supercharger out for the ported one...