I would like to upgrade to a HighPerformance Air Intake system on my 2004 XJ. Does anyone have experience with this and recommendations on an Air Intake system?

Thanks

Ralph

 

You probably won't like this recommendation, but it's very difficult to beat the factory design, in fact, I'll go as far as saying impossible given the room constraints. Performance opportunity doesn't really exist in the air intake design and most aftermarket gear out there will have you at status quo or going backwards in performance. Consider it for looks, but you're not going to get performance.

Be cautious of claims of HP gains by advertisers. Anyone who knows dynos, knows you can make them report almost anything you want them to; anything except actual HP gains.

 

Right on Steve. It's good advice Viper.

Some time back one of the leading performance magazines did a dyno test of the various after mkt. HP upgrades available. They determined that the air intake mods were the least effective, yielding in the range of 2 to 5 HP increase which was undetetable on the street. Now this was with the Chevy 350 engine, not a bad reference.

They also determined that if you opened up the exhaust, installed higher lift cams and high rise intakes the low restriction air intake began to pay off big time at the top end. If you are willing to settle for boy racer cheesy sound on your Jag, I think you can get it with one of the low restriction air intake systems available.

 

I tried the Mina cold air intake and it caused the engine light to come on. Switched back to factory intake and all is well. These cars are very sensitive to using non OEM set-ups in the air flow. Be careful. The Mina exhaust work fine though!

 

The only thing high performance on these kits is that it puts money in the advertisers pocket in a high performance way! It will put nothing in your power reserves. These things are snake oil for the average car owner. In some cases, since they pick up hot air under the hood which is lower density than the cold air from the original filter box, power will actually drop! These kits include oiled air filters which also are worse than useless in that they filter incompletely and can add oil (especially if over-oiled as most are) into the air flow which will coat and deteriorate the performance of the heated wire MAF sensor, degrading performance and mileage (and turning on the check engine light)! These large luxury cars are worked out well for dependable power, messing with them is a waste of energy. The most fun would be to upgrade from the standard car to the R model.

 

A co-worker had the Mina Intake installed on his S-Type R and it was not very high quality either. Unless you got deep pockets, save the intake money for repairs.

The most noticable performance gain will come from racier tires.