is there a difference?

I have a 1997 NA riviera and I replaced the air hose that runs to the throttle body with that of supercharged riviera. Will this make a difference in how the car performs? Good or bad? I didn't do if for performance I just thought it looked cooler and that the original one seemed like it wasn't a tight fit.

Sorry I didn't know the exact name of the hose, but it connects your air filter to the throttle body if that helps.

I've never done that swap, but I suspect it does not make a difference except that if the old one was loose the engine would have been sucking unfiltered air, which is a problem long term. An internal combustion engine does not run very long on unfiltered air, the grit hacks away at the internals.

Thanks. I just wanted to get an opinion. I did know if was good for the car or not.

RvieraRider wrote:

Thanks. I just wanted to get an opinion. I did know if was good for the car or not.

I see what you're getting at, sorry.

If you look at the other posts about/around this subject you'll find that the RIv's stock air intake system is not really restrictive at all. Some people claim they get better performance if they take the muffler out of the air box, and others counter that the difference is measurable on the butt-dyno test machine only.

IIRC the point of real restriction actually is the downpipe from the exhaust manifold to the cat. The cat itself is not really restrictive at all. Thinking about it the high output/fastest street-legal RIvs of have either the stock intake or stock with muffler removed, larger downpipe, rest of exhaust stock. They also have custom PCM tuning, Autolite 104 plugs (to help handle the tune), trick cams (see http://www.intense-racing.com), 130-pound valve springs, oversized valves/modified heads, and smaller (under 3" diameter but not much like 2.8") blower pullies. They also probably have higher stall torque converters. There is more on that intense-racing web site.

There are a number of passenger cars, certain Hondas come to mind, where the under-hood packaging is such that you get a lot of gain from removing/modifying the air intake because they are so restrictive. That's just not the case for the Riv, it had different engineering objectives than, say, a Civic. Here is another article for a gut-the-airbox modification. They found that preformance got worse... and better... let them explain: http://www.dynoperformance.com/article_details.php?article_id=24

Happy reading.

Albertj