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In my opinion, which may well differ from other people's, the downpipe should come first. That being said, I have both. I have a full 3" exhaust we made, and an FMIC that we made the plumbing for. The way I mounted the intercooler and plumbed it (on an '85 900T) I retained my air conditioning system, but lost the little inboard white parking lights in the bezels next to the grille. I didn't chop off the tow hooks, and had to cut minimal clearances into the radiator support members, but I don't think this scheme would fit in an 87+ car, I had to take some material out of the backs of the headlight buckets to clearance the tubing.
Opening up the exhaust will let you make the same or better power with less boost, and will help spoolup, it will add power. The FMIC will only sustain the power you can make for a longer time, I.E. towards the end of the 1/4, during long highway pulls, etc.
For less installation headache than the FMIC, you could go to water/meth injection, this accomplishes about the same thing as a big intercooler, give or take. There are a few differences you will have to research.
For whatever reason I stayed away from water/meth and went the headers/lightened flywheel/FMIC/3" downpipe/2.1L head route, and I really like the driveability of opening everything up. With the restrictive hardware you will still have the clammy feeling engine around town, but can still make big power on the highway and at the strip, it's a tradeoff with how much you want to spend really. All the hardware, software, and rebuild '91 gearbox in my 900 is probably close to about an $8k investment by now, and I do all the work myself. You can probably have similar 1/4 times for a quarter that much money, but I feel that the driveability really suffers just going to turbo, software, W/M.
The trick is to learn what the effect and reasoning is behind anything you change in the engine, and to tailor a package that suits what you want to accomplish. If it's 1/4 times your setup will be different than Damien's road race setup, will be different from Claude's ice race setup, will be different from John William's road setup. You have to do the setup for the results you want.
There are some old threads with pics of my FMIC install and of driving impressions of my car with some of the hardware upgrades if you search my posting name, DrewP.
Best,
Drew
posted by 129.105.72...
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