Strife

I've been planning on getting a 951 for a long time. But now that I'm starting to look around, I realize that I may not be able to do much in the way of performance upgrades and still stay street legal.

I want to stay CARB compliant and not have to remove all my mods every two years for smog testing.

What do you living in CA do for performance, short of an engine swap?

Danno

You can get away with just about ANYTHING short of removing the catalytic (pretty obvious with the visual inspection). The air-cleaner is fair game since the car doesn't use a sealed airbox (TAC) for EGR. Chips and AFM/MAF are free as long as you can pass emissions. I used the stock wiring-harness for my MAF upgrade and the smog technicians didn't even blink.

Strife

Thanks. Do you know if they check to see if the turbo is stock? If you add a boost gauge, blow off valve, intercooler, etc, won't they fail you on visual unless all of them have CARB cert?

Danno

Turbo is fair game too. No way anyone can look at a turbo (if they can even find it) and tell if it's stock or not. Actually, there is only a short list of smog-related things that are inspected. I don't recall exactly what they are, but any smog shop will show you their book and what components are necessary for the visual-inspection. And aside from those, any upgrade is fine as long as you pass emissions.