My buddy recently bought a 2007 Saturn Sky Redline and he wants to increase the performance, he knows little to nothing about cars and what parts would be needed, costs etc... I drive JDM and everything is so easy for me to find, but I can't seem to find anything for the Sky. Where do I look?
Exhausts, intercoolers, intakes, turbos, etc... can you upgrade fuel injectors on this? Where can we find someone to tune one of these?
We have a few performance suppliers, and they have been discussed here quite a lot. As a starting point go to Solstice and Sky and look at what they have to offer, then come back here and do a search for whatever you find interesting. You will find discussions about, and alternate vendors for, just about everything they sell. You should also join https://www.solsticeforum.com/ because we share a platform and there is a lot of performance discussion over there as well.
Good luck, welcome to the forum, and I hope your friend enjoys his car.
You will never find as much for this platform as you will for a JDM vehicle. Hell, my son picked up a 1992 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 and his aftermarket is as big or bigger than ours. However, there isn't much you CAN'T do to these cars. I've attached a couple pictures of my car for reference and realize mine started off as a base model. Here are some of the things you can get for our cars:
Cold Air Intake (though no performance gain on the stock turbo setup)
Bigger Turbo
Intercoolers
Charge Pipes
High flow cat or catless downpipes
Catback Exhausts
Coil Overs
Sway Bars
Front, Rear, Middle chassis and suspension arm braces
Quiafe Limited Slip Diff
Clutches and Flywheels
Injectors (but being direct injected we currently only have one injector option for an OEM setup)
Extra injectors
Cams
Fuel pumps, both in tank and high pressure
Forged Pistons
Forged Rods (engine already has forged crank)
Intake Manifolds
Dash trim
Big brake kits
Larger brake rotors and better brake pads
Larger Valves
Heavier Valve Springs
Lighter Titanium Valve Retainers
ARP hardware for head and timing chain
ARP wheel studs
Carbon Fiber D-shaped custom steering wheels
Headlight and Tail light eyelids
Driver's pillar gauge cluster
I am sure I am missing some things and I'm not including custom items you can do like seats, door panels, paint, graphics, wheels, etc. Really though, while choices are limited and pricing may be higher than what you're use to in a much larger market like you have with JDM stuff, there isn't much you can't do to our cars which you can do to others.
For tuning, we use HP Tuners which is a pretty popular tuning suite for American vehicles. Also, all the vendors above can do remote tuning if you want a true tune or some also provide some canned tunes from a company called Trifecta. I am all for the custom remote tuning over canned stuff. There are also some other resources through Facebook so I highly suggest you look for the groups on there as well as solsticeforum.com.
One thing I want to note about the Redline your friend got. It's ECM uses a targeted torque value to adjust what the engine is doing. If you install something like an exhaust which lets the engine breath easier you will have a slight performance increase initially but fairly quickly it will feel stock again and you may note that your boost levels have dropped. This is referred to here as the "learn down" feature of the stock tune. The ECM will control boost to hit the level of torque it is programmed to hit and if it is making more torque than that target, it pulls boost to hit it (it will also raise boost to hit it up to a point). So if your buddy does some basic performance mods but doesn't do a tune, he won't benefit from those mods completely.
The Pontiac Solstice is basically the same car (interior and body panels are different but chassis/suspension/brakes/powertrain are identical) and for some reason it seems there are a lot more guys over there into doing big mods than over here.
And speaking of big mods...and you being JDM...engine swaps are popular for our cars too. While most go the LSX V8 route, we've had a few folks do 2JZ swaps too. The manual transmission in these cars is a AR-5 which is a derivative of the R-154 in the Supra. Take a 1JZ bell housing and it bolts up to our transmission. Supra owners actually will use the AR-5 out of our cars due to the fact that it is stronger than the stock trans in the Supra. The big 2JZ Sky owner is not on here much but he is active in the FB group.
And just to tease your friend...Here is the 2JZ Sky I was talking about and also a Twin Turbo LS7 Sky. There is quite a bit you can do to these cars as both these swaps, while pretty major, are also pretty straightforward. Also, there is a book GM Performance put out on doing things like race prep, roll bars, and drift setups for the Solstice but these would also apply to the Sky. I've attached a picture of the cover of this book.
The fact that you ask about fuel injectors indicates that you may be an old carb era guy. Changing injector size gets you absolutely nothing unless you have done other mods to the engine that takes you out of the flow envelope of the stock injectors. Many people fail to understand this on injected cars and end up with far more injector than they need and horrible idle because their new injectors flow too much fuel even at their minimum opening time.
How much power you can get out of these engines before expecting issues to arise is a moving target. I went conservative and stayed at around 375 bhp, but others exceed 400 bhp using larger turbos, often crossing their fingers and going with stock bottom ends when new connecting rods and forged pistons would have added a layer of insurance. Maybe tell your buddy to hang around here and on the Solstice site ahile and look at the various mod threads to get ideas of what to do as well as what the problems might be before jumping into serious modification.
I have the Wilwoods on one of my Sky Redlines and another ready to go on a second Redline Sky. After I first installed them I thought that I might have made a mistake because they grabbed so hard. Just light pedal pressure was like beating the brakes with a sledgehammer. They needed to be slowly broken in. After twenty or so miles of braking with slowly increasing pedal pressure each time, they stabilized to a point that I hoped they would. That is why I bought a second set and probably will buy another for the third Sky. You will have to remove the backplate dust shield or maybe you can get away with cutting it so it doesn't rub. And it would be better if you replace the hoses because they need to be about a half inch longer so they don't pull tight at maximum steering angles.
For full disclosure, I am still wet behind the ears being a new Sky owner. Has anything successfully been done with a performance electric version of a Sky?
Rather than go through all the associated development costs of building an electric car from the ground up, Cincinnati-based Advanced Mechanical Products (AMP) has decided to replace GM's four-cylinder petrol engine in its Saturn Sky roadster with its own electric motor. This effectively turns...
I'm new to the Sky forum, and had to sort through a lot of information to get an idea of what improvements are available. Here I will try to build a short and sweet list of options. The early major lifting is thanks to @Robotech Here's the Excel sheet It's a live document I'll be updating as I...
www.skyroadster.com
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