Individual Throttle Body (ITB)...

ITB fitted on my previous car...

The benefit of fitting ITB was to gain more horsepower and instant response... Response was very important to a naturally aspirated (NA) car... This was what seperates between NA engine and a turbo engine... I must admit that once the turbine on the turbo engine started spooling, the sound and pulling power that it makes were spectacular... But nothing beats an ITB... The sound that it makes on wide open throttle (WOT) was just plain wonderful... The sound that it makes must be experience for self proclaim petrolheads...

Not many engines came fitted with ITB... The most common and one of the most famous engine that came fitted with ITB out of the factory was the Toyota 4age 20V engine... In fact the throttle body that I used for my previous car came from the Toyota engine... Previously, I am driving a Perodua Kelisa, hence the 3 throttle instead of 4 as you can see from the pics above...

I must admit that the ITB gave me some problems... The first one was tuning... It was very hard to tune... It was advisable to use standalone ECU for ITB application... As cost was a huge factored for me, I used Apexi SAFC instead of standalone to tune my car... Idling was the main problem... The car idle very badly... If you set the throttle position sensor liked the way it was meant to be, the engine will stalled... So we need to set it like a race car... Very high idling... My car will be idling at around 2,000 rpm... Secondly, the engine vibrates very badly... This cause my intake manifold to crack not once but twice...

Because of the sound and performance that it makes, I never really complaint about it... What I can said was I never really extracted the full potential of the ITB... In order to extract the full potential, your engine must have high cams, port and polish cylinder head, standalone ECU, bigger injector and etc... Most people will just turned to turbo engine because it was a lot easier to increased horsepower... Change to a bigger turbo and up the boost and you can easily gained 50bhp whereas it was very hard for a NA engine to even gained 5bhp... It is also a lot more expensive to tune a NA engine...

But I was really happy with the performance because I got to beat a Kelisa with bolt on turbo on the way to Genting...