Back pressure good or bad?
 

me and my cousin are having a little disaggreement on whether back pressure is good or bad...
i say u need a certain amount of back pressure and he says i should put straight pipes on because it will make it faster and that it will not make u loose torque.......

i personally know he is wrong because the pipe snapped between my muffler and the h pipe on the passenger side and u could feel the loss of torque, the gas mileage went down and the idle went to ****


JAMES

He owes you a beer.

Take care,
-Chris

k thx for confirming that chris

Yep, if you loose back pressure, you loose torque; thats why all those ricers are f$*king morons, cause they put on "performance" exhaust systems that have extremely low back pressure, and they end up using what little torque they have.

but what is the fine line in between losing and gainging tourqe?

There is no fine line. You never want to lose torque. If losing torque is a consequence of gaining horsepower, then sometimes it's worth the loss.

When you have an engine that is being restricted by exhuast, then you want to lose backpressure. When you have an engine that is not really being restricted by backpressure, then it's unnecessary to do any modifications for performance purposes.

My Bronco had a really bad(stock) exhuast so I took off the main cat back, still has the pre cat for now, but I noticed that it got more torque and horsepower(so I think).

Exactly. However you CAN gain horsepower by putting on less restrictive exhaust, hense reducing back pressure. ;)

No doubt, but if the exhaust isn't what's holding the power back, making it more free flowing will sometimes result in a drop in backpressure which can reduce low end torque.

I have exhaust mods on my car, the H pipe and the exhaust, it's cutting backpressure, but the stock parts hurt power above 4000rpm. My car pulls WAY better up top than it did with the crap exhaust on it. ;)