i have been told by a chrysler dealer that there are not one, not two but three restrictor plates on the engine of the crossfire. does anybody happen to have any idea where they are located so i can take them off and get some free muscle out of it. or is this a bad idea? should i avoid taking them off because they might damage the engine? now i only plan on taking two off so it remains street legal, and i'm sure they're pointless anyway since the slk 320 doesn't have them. so if anyone happens to have any input on the issue i would gladly appreciate hearing from you.

 

I am not aware of any 'restrictor plates' as such other than the two little deflector plates behind the grill on the intakes. Some people have removed these and felt a bit more 'go' but you will probably get a lot more crud into the filter boxes, which tend to get pretty gritty anyway (see below). The only other restrictions as such are the actual design of the air box and switching inlet tract plenum. The SLK and Crossfire both have identical power output (at least on paper for the Euro cars 215/218 depending on the type of measurement quoted) so if they do exist the don't seem to be doing much! I could be completely wrong of course but I have had the complete inlet tract/MAF/Plenum apart and not found anything. The plenum is actually assembly is actually all bonded so its hard to see exactly what is inside the runners etc. I guess its possible there is something in there but I can't think why they would bother when they could just cripple the ECU if they wanted to restrict the car to keep the boys at MB happy.

 

Yuck!

How many miles on that air filter?

 

Not many, only about 3,000 from memory. I was doing some tests on the filters to see how restrictive they were and there was something like 100 grams of dirt held in the filter compared with the new ones, I'll have to dig back through my results for the real figures. I do drive a lot of country roads everyday though.

 

There is no physical restrictor plate anywhere in the intake system. I've inspected the entire disassembled engine. Again, a perfect example of the dealer service "professionals" not knowing WTF they are talking about when it comes to the Crossfire.

The are two electronic restrictors integrated into the system (1) rev limiter on manual transmissions (2) speed limiter. Both cut the fuel when the limit is reached... Eliminating the rev limiter will do nothing but allow you to ruin your engine by over revving it since the power band is located between 4,200 & 5,200 RPM's. Removing the speed limiter will do nothing for you either since I doubt you'll ever have the car up to 150 mph.