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Normal cars are designed from wide temperature ranges (something like -30F to 130F), -100 to 14k feet altitude, with a wide range of sand, dirt, snow, ice, hail and a wide variety of roads surfaces and steepness. Generally they seem designed to last 100k miles under normal use and terrible things don't happen if you forget an oil change. You can do a chip tune that might get you more HP across a wide range of RPMs, but you won't be as robust, will need maintenance more often, and will likely wear through oil, gas, differentials, clutches, and related more quickly. There's MANY things you can do that all basically come down to burning more gas+o2 in less time. Higher intake airflow (turbo, supercharger, better/missing air filters, scoops, etc), bored out cylinders for more engine displacement, more gas (increased fuel pressure/pumps), increased RPMs, and decreased exhaust pressure (better pipes, decreased or missing cats). Trick is, more gas+o2 burned = more heat, more wear, more stress, hotter oil, faster clutch wearing, faster tire wearing, and generally faster brake wearing. Turbos are driven by exhaust, spin at crazy RPMs, increase air intake pressure, and generally are harder on the engine and oil and make cooling more of an issue. Higher RPMs require more precise timing, better valves+springs, better balanced cam shafts, etc. So what might seem like a cheap/easy change like increasing turbo boost from 10psi to 15psi might like a good idea, but have major impact on engine life and maintenance costs. A single blown head gasket from the increased temp, increased vibration, and increased pressure can be very expensive. Much like CPUs of today, cars are generally designed carefully for their performance level and there's less spare performance left to be easily tweaked. Much like how older CPUs could be overclocked for substantial performance gains. Now both cars and CPUs will throttle if they don't have enough cooling or any of numerous other sensors detect potential problems. It's pretty common these days to see a car with 300hp, but 350hp for up to 10 seconds before the sensors reel you back in. |