I have been saving up for a while and I have the money to make my next mod to my Vantage, but I'm having a hard time deciding what to do next.

Right now I have Air filters, a new exhaust, and new door sills that will be going on soon but I thought I'd see what people think.

Which of these should I do first.

1) 200 Cell cats

2) ECU flash

Either one will come from RSC.

Thoughts?

 

Congrats on the mods. I thought over the same things on the performance side and went with the cats and filters. They make a great sound and give you a little extra oomph. I would do the cats, filter and exhaust install all at once, much cheaper. The filters are underneath the car and once it is up in the air your installer can access easily. The cats are sort of welded to the oem exhaust so easy to replace all at once. If you get the RSC cats you will need to buy bolts or have your installer get them. Ask Stuart for size, they are not shipped with cats.
I would do the ecu tune after all these physical mods.
Where did you get the sills? How did you match color? How much?

 

Crown wheel & pinion.

 

I'm mid process in your mod schedule (just installed the filters and cats ... off for dyno testing today on the new set up) and ECU tuning about to follow. I'll post details in a new thread later but one thing you may want to consider is noise. I've got the stock exhaust and adding the cats alone to that does give you a big boost in dbs. Not sure which exhaust you have but, having now had the cats on for a week, I would not be planning to put a on louder exhaust.

 

Indeed. The sport cats turn up the volume to 11 even with a stock exhaust (at least when the valves are open).

 

LOL!

I think we could turn that into a meme... the answer to everything?

 

sure, kinda like "more cowbell"

 

On PH the gag is whenever anyone asks 'what car for £XXXX, the answer is always Mazda MX-5

 

Agreed. I have the cats and stock exhaust. When the valves are open on high trottle it's all the noise you need.

 

The tunnel blasts are ******* unreal

 

I did get the quietest exhaust from RSC so I could run both exhaust and cats.

Crown wheel & pinion, aye? Back in my motorcycle days when anyone stated talking about tweaking their bikes my friends and I would always chime in with "Bigger mains!" because bigger main jets fix everything.

I'm thinking I'll go with the cats since I will have the car up on the lift for everything else anyway.

Got any sales going on Stuart?

 

I just ordered the 200 cell Cats from RSC. As soon as they come in I'll set up a service to get everything installed. This should be fun!

 

They are pretty easy to install if you have access to a lift. I could not wait!!

 

Now have the RSC tune on board and it makes a bigger impact on performance than the cats (altho the process resulted in some scary codes getting thrown and put the car into limp mode initially but fortunately Stuart is always on his email and saved the day - no this does not happen to all cars apparently).

Will post my detailed experiences later once I have had a chance to run it out for a while and finishing dyno-ing everything but I think you'll be very pleased with the combo once you have it together. Bottom line though is that the cats make a big impact on noise, the tune is more about power and throttle responsiveness.

 

I actually got them from another board member. He ordered them but decided to go for new wheels instead. He sold them to me to help cover part of his new wheel purchase. I'm not sure where he ordered them from, but when he did he and another Aston owner both ordered sets and they shipped 1 box with 2 lefts and another box with 2 rights. They didn’t figure this out until install time so I have one painted and one unfinished. I'll let my dealership worry about matching them up. They had to do a bit of work in my driver side door by the door latch mechanism and when they repainted they did a perfect match.