Hello all,
About a week ago, I decided to sell my car (Camaro SS vert), motorcycle, and jet ski in an effort to simplify my life - I'm military and it was becoming a hassle to move and take care of three different vehicles. I enjoyed my previous 01 vette, so I'm going to buy my dad's C5 vette from him (he's upgrading to a C6, obviously giving me a good deal) and I'll have about $4-5K left over to mod it. I can afford to spend more than this if need be, but it's hard for me to justify pouring that much money into mods that actually hurt the resale value of the car.

Right now the car has Borla Stingers and a dual cone K&N intake. I don't really care about any specific track times or performance metric, more so seat of the pants feel - my main goal here is to make the car fun enough to drive that I don't miss the sheer acceleration of my motorcycle. I never track my cars anymore (blew the tranny and rear on my 01), and this is my daily driver, so I would need a setup that was reliable and offered useful power on the street.

Also, a bonus would be the ability to restore the car to stock (or close to it) at minimal cost down the road - I intend to keep this car for a while, but I've said that with every car/motorcycle I've owned and haven't done so yet so I'm not going to do anything irreversible. I wouldn't be opposed to spending the extra $$ for a supercharger if I could be convinced that I could restore the car back to stock relatively easily and recoup some of the mod costs by selling the blower separately.

Any advice you can offer is greatly appreciated!!

Tommy

 

What year is the C5?

If pre-2001, then an LS6 intake is a good first mod. You already have a catback and intake.

Beyond that, cam (224 duration or less to keep stock like driveablility) headers, heads and gears would be about the only performance mods you could do. Most of those require quite extensive re-work to remove if you want to return to stock.

In your situation wanting to keep close to stock, I'd go in this order
1) gears $1500
2) cam +tune $2000
3) headers + retune $1800
4) heads ??? $1000 - $3000 depending on vendor and "stage"

And stop when you are happy with the performance.
Most people would put those in different order, but based on your wanting to saty close to stock, I'd keep them in that order. Once you go headers, you can have emmissions problems due to the location of the O2 sensor further back and the high flow (or non-existent) cats.

If you want to go FI, then you are looking at minimum $8000 to begin.

.02

 

for you situation i would say just headers tune and gears in the back and a stall converter if its auto