Toyota Yaris DIY

OK, being the cheap-ass I am, I decided to see whether I could make any mods to increase performance/efficiency for as little as possible. I was Checking out some local garage/yard sales, when I found some vacuum cleaner hose for like $2. SCORE!!

I take my car to the track often and find that I have issues with brake fade after a few laps. I looked inside the guard liner and pretty much figured out why; with any lack of adequate airflow to the brakes. Since my car doesn’t have fogs, I took off the blanking panels and thought hmm… and cut about a foot of the vacuum cleaner hose for each side and ziptied one end to the ‘fog hole’ and the other end to a hole a holesawed in the guardliner kinda directed at the back of the rotor. After a few repeated test runs (120kph – 0), I found it took the brakes a few more stops before significant fade started.
That’s cheap practical mod #1…

I’ve thought of getting an intake made up so the filter was in the wheelwell, so it was a cold air intake and not a hot air intake like if the filter sat where the airbox would be… More messing around included takign the airbox snorkel off and going for some ‘spirited’ runs in the mountains. WHOA!!! the induction noise was sweeet. But (according to scangauge2), intake temps had pretty much doubled that if I had kept the snorkel. So back on went hte snorkel and back to thinking I went. The vacuum hose came to mind and I set another piece up to the fog hole, and near the mouth of the intake snorkel to effectively have a cold air ram feed. Intake temps dropped a few degrees *c, so…
Cheap practical mod #2 done & dusted!

Then I looked at the airbox and went hmm… (I do that a lot) and saw how it almost sat behind the radiator. So I went to the local hardware store and found some adhesive insulation tape. Got it home and took out the airbox (top and bottom). Then pretty much covered it up in the insulation tape and put it back in… Went for some more ‘spirited’ runs and found intake temps to stay aournd the same, but rise slower than before during the drive… Also put some mesh over the intake snorkel incase my vacuum tube sucks up anything…
So cheap mod #3!!