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I think you gain a little. On mine the 2 1/2" Y-pipe and main cat combined with the elimination of the pre-cats made a SOTP difference (what ever the butt dyno is worth).
you say 2 1/2" mandrel bent front Y w/o pre-cats. Can a muffler shop do this to me? And what is 2 1/2" in the european metric system? And what is "mandrel bent"?
I had a local specialty shop custom build a 2 1/2" SS front Y-pipe for me. They mandrel bent and welded the tubing into a very clean unit that just bolted up to my hi-flow cat and the stock headers.
Mandrel bent means all bends are done on a mandrel to give a smooth contour, without the waffeling you see in the factory pipes at the bends. This waffeling effectively reduces the cross-section and so reduces flow. If you do a crude measurement on some of the stock bends you'll see that the cross-section may be less than half that in a straight section.