I'm an old hot-rodder (ran a couple Chrysler Hemi cars in the 70's, actually), and my son's buddy has a Subaru WRX which, with one of the little tuner boxes, has run 13.2 second quarters (amazing--faster than an STI) although one of the things he's manipulating is turbo boost (I don't think the brand new Subie his daddy bought him will make it past 20k miles).

Anyway, I will research this more later (working on honey do Saturday things right now), but I just did a quick lookup on livewire tuners and it looks like they have a couple models (like $379 and $569). Is there any way that you can tweak a 4.6 so it will continue to run on regular but give some more low-end and midrange grunt without a loss in gas mileage? I'm not gonna be running my E150 at the strip, but I miss the grunt of the old Chevy 350 in my '96 Savana (although that was the Van from Hell for other reasons).

These little thingies just plug into the OBD2 port, right? Do they reprogram the PCM flash, or do they just override it while they're plugged in?

My 60k Premium Care warranty is up in 800 miles, so this might be the right time to play with the van just a little--it's an '02 with the PI heads, same as the current 4.6 (and the dealer replaced the heads for me at 42k based on a TSB regarding a bad run of early Romeo PI heads).

Talk to me, bud...

Thanks in advance for any info,
George