A little more power for the 2tr daily?

So I know you can’t do much with the 4 cylinder, some would say just trade it for a V6 and I would but currently I have this truck on a lien title (some unfortunate stuff happened) so why not make the truck a little more fun to drive while I’m dealing with that lien. I know bolt ons will do very little for horsepower. The only thing I have is an afe dry air filter. I would boost it but I don’t how well the auto transmission and driveshaft would handle it plus I’m in California so it wouldn’t pass smog. So I found I could just do headers and leave the exhaust stock to keep the low end torque. I did some research and the only carb legal headers available is the doug thorley tri-y headers and tri-y headers are supposedly better for low and mid range power which I believe that’s where the 2tr shines? Anyways I’m not in a huge hurry to get these headers, (they’re almost 1k what the hell…) so I figured I can get them by the end of July or August. A quick show case of the daily prerunner :3

 

I recommend OTT. I have a gen 2 2.7 auto (an absolute dog, as is) and I have about 415 lbs of added weight, including 32" E rated tires, up from factory 30.5" standard loads. I try to keep it as light as possible with full skids and sliders. Anyway, I got the OTT medium tune and my truck feels basically the same as it did before I put all the stuff on and ran larger tires. It is still slow, but it would struggle hard to get moving with no tune, and helps a lot with the gear hunting. If I did the tune and didnt add armor, I imagine it would be noticeably peppier. In my opinion, the tune just makes the truck run like it should from the factory, and I have heard from many that it is carb compliant depending on what level tune you go for. It was $400 for the tune and only took about 2 hours.

I have also heard that there are some headers than pair well with the engine, as recommended by URD to use with their SC kit, which it seems like you are already privy to!

 

Yeah headers and a tune would probably be the only thing I do performance wise before I LS swap the truck, I would buy a Silverado but I really like this truck. That also means I should start getting ready to bring home another daily for when I do the swap. Maybe a 3rd gen V6 taco???