XristosP

Hello Eveyone,

My name is Chris, I am 31 yrs old and have some expirence with modding cars and tuning. I have owned a few performance cars: Z28's, Mustangs, Corvettes, M3'S even a a Grand Prix GTP (I will never own a front wheel drive ever again!!!) I bought my 2002 Sc430 about three years back. It had 50K was driving by an older lady in AZ and was serviced only by Scottsdale Lexus. I had owned a 1999 GS300 and thought the SC430 was a clean looking car, so I bought it.
After a month later I began to notice that my SC was really sluggish off the line, even when I stomped on it, compared to the other cars I have owned it was kind of a sloth. So my quest to change that began, I bought a Blitz Throttle Controller a k/n filter and I put on custom pipes. It got a little better but not much. I stopped for a while as I found no aftermarket for this car. However it resparked when I read about doing a LSD swap from a MKIVSupra 3.76 LSD.
Then it died again as I could not find one that would ship to CA for under 3G's. SO, let me get to the end already, I noticed the sc300 and gs300 have the same style rear pumkin as my SC430 with 3.91 gear as opposed to the 3.26 gear but they are NOT LSD rears. I would have better acceleration but I would be dog legging it and it would be worse in the twisties (that's not a big deal becasue its not that good there now anyways!).
I have hit search on CL for this found that LexPro did it I just want some more advice/opinons on this. Thanx much!

Harold57

Before you go to all that trouble try a couple of things to circumvent the ECU. That darn thing is programmed to learn how you drive and trim the performance accordingly. Basically, what happens is that the performance gradually declines past the point of annoyance to the point of potentially being dangerous, IMHO.

>> First try running in the performance mode or even manually shifting the gears. Since you have an '02, you have all of the gears available to you manually, if you want.
>> Second, try resetting the ECU. (I don't remember the sequence by heart, but do a search on this forum and you will find the sequence to reset the ECU without disconnecting the battery.)

Good luck and let us know how it comes out.

Welcome to the forum.

XristosP

THANX Harold57!
I have put it on performance. SP 3 I think is what it says, though I tend to keep it in ECO in normal driving. So I will pose this question would it be better to have my ECU remapped/install a piggy back, so I would not have to reset it all the time?

itruns

ECO remaps (softens) the throttle response, making a not quick car...slower. Not really what you want. If you drive in economy mode all the time, that what the cars thinks you want/expect and it will adapt to it… If that is the case, a good reset should help the car
re-learn your real desired driving style.

So far the best improvements seem to be PPE headers and shorter rear gears... 3:96’s may be too much for a 2002 with only a 5spd auto. Possibility of hitting the rev-limiter and will be “buzzy” at highway speeds. An 06+ with the 6 speed tranny would probably be ok with that though.

I have seen higher stall TQ converters advertised as well which on other cars I have see good improvements, but I haven't heard any reports on the SC... Maybe a CAI as well... For the adventurous there is always N02, although I haven’t heard any reports on the SC for N02 either.

XristosP

I have never been a fan of running squeeze on stock internals, so thats out. I ran a injen intake for about a week, total fail, it felt like I lost power. Tq converter sounds interesting I never looked into the what the stock stall speed is I'll be searching for more info on that tonight.
So I'll reset the ECU, run it on SP3 only and the ECU learns to be faster?
Thank you itruns for the info.

GS4_Fiend

iTrader: (22)

Try cleaning the MAF sensor if you haven't.