When people talk about Audi's, many people jump straght to the R8 and the RS cars. Of course, they're flashy, fast and mostly rare. However the V6 Supercharged S4 and S5 sometimes has even more potention than those cars listed above. The supercharged V6 occupy a sweet spot, offering dynamic performance, refinement, and understated but classic good looks that have continued to age well, ever since the original S5 was released in 2008. As good as these cars are out of the box, there are several effective modifications to improve the acceleration, braking, handling, and overall looks. Here are some of the top five modifications for your 3.0T S4 or S5.

Audi S4 Exhaust

Let's talk about exhaust. One of the first thing many people change after they get a car is the exhaust system. It adds so much joy and dynamic to the car, and also free up a lot of the air flow and giving you a slight performance gain. If you are someone like me, who enjoys a loud and rowdy car on weekends, but also wants a quiet and tamed car on week days, a Valved exhaust is for you.

One of my favorite is the ECS Tuning Valved Cat-Back Exhaust. The build quality is great, fitment is on point and most importantly, it sounds godly. Comparing to it's fellow competitors such as Armytrix, FI or IPE, the price is only a fraction. I had this setup on my personal vehicle and till this day, I absolutely love it. When the valves are open, the car sounds like a track car. It's aggressive, mean and you can sometimes hear the pops as well. But when you close the valves, it transforms back to a stock car. I actually think it is quieter than a stock S4 to be honest. So if you are looking for a exhaust system, I would highly recommend the ECS Tuning Valved Exhaust.

Suspension
Audi S4 Lowering Springs

Sport lowering springs are probably one of the easiest and most common choices when it comes to suspension upgrades. There is no denying that a lowered S4 or S5 has a decidedly purposeful look. Sport springs come in many varieties, from mild to wild, so it’s important to consider what kind of roads you drive on and how you drive the car, as these can impact what the best choice will be for your S4 or S5.

A perfect combination in our opinion would be the H&R Sport Lowering Springs. It provide a noticeable but not excessive reduction in ride height and are designed to offer an excellent ride quality with improved handling over the factory springs.  Offering up a large 2” (50 mm) drop, these will give you an aggressive look, but at the expense of ride quality when it comes to larger bumps. They’re best matched with upgraded shocks and struts, as the factory shocks are not going to last as long at that low ride height.

Audi S4 Coilovers

If you’re someone who wants a more aggressive, lower, style, or you’re just picky about the ride height and the handling performance of your S4 or S5, an adjustable coilover suspension may be the right choice for you. Coilovers are height-adjustable, with threaded perches allowing you to fine-tune your look or weight balance of the car down to the millimeter. Many kits also offer adjustable damping, which enables you to make the shock absorber either more or less firm. This can be used to give the car a more or less compliant ride, or it can be used to help change the balance of the car by controlling weight transfer.

Pricing and features of coilover suspension span a range of budgets, so if you find yourself more interested in these over springs, fear not. They also have the added benefit of often having an improved ride and better handling over the factory suspension, thanks to higher quality dampers and perfectly matched spring and damper rates.

If you’re looking for a suspension that is a bit less costly but still uses the highest quality components, one of H&R’s many coilover suspensions is a great choice. H&R arguably invented the street coilover as a product, and their Street Performance coilover suspension uses inverted monotube dampers, similar to Sachs Performance and Bilstein, but without adjustable rates. You can still fine-tune your ride height, but thanks to reduced complexity, these come in at a significantly lower price while still offering superb handling.

Audi S4 ECU/TCU Tune

There is no better bang for the buck for horsepower on a 3.0T than a performance tune for the ECU. Utilizing the on-board diagnostic (OBD) port, tuners such as Integrated Engineering, APR, and 034 Motorsport, can make changes to the fueling, timing, and boost parameters to increase horsepower and torque. Like most other Audi engines, the supercharged 3.0T is overbuilt from the factory. This means that there aren’t any other required parts to achieve a major increase in the power from the engine. When properly maintained, you shouldn’t see any reduction in long term durability or reliability either.

 ‘Stage 1’ tune is likely to require no other parts and makes no requirement other than the use of a certain octane of fuel. power is increased to 392 horsepower and 351 lb-ft of torque with 91 octane fuel. Rated for 91 octane fuel, you can use anything 91 or higher, but not lower. Although this is a simplified explanation, basically, the higher the octane, the greater the resistance to pre-ignition, and the more power can be made. That same tune in Stage 1+, 93 octane spec, makes 415 horsepower and 360 lb-ft of torque. That is a gain of 82 horsepower and 35 lb-ft of torque over factory power numbers with absolutely zero other changes to the car.

Audi S4 Supercharger Pullies

A large part of the reason you can gain so much power with the 3.0T is due to an increase in the boost from the supercharger from the performance ECU software. Upgrading to an aftermarket supercharger pulley, crank pulley, or both, will spin the charger faster and allow it to make more boost, and therefore potentially more power. A corresponding ECU tune has to be installed along with a pulley change. Depending on the tune and exact parts being used, such as a free-flow intake and exhaust, or cooling components, a dual-pulley 3.0T can make close to 500 horsepower on standard 93 octane fuel. That’s an outstanding 160 horsepower gain over the factory 333 horsepower rating, all without touching anything inside the engine or compromising the engine’s overall reliability.

Audi S4 Intake

Upgrading your intake system is one of the cornerstones of performance tuning. Making power is all about moving air in and then back out of the engine in the most efficient manner possible. A performance intake also has the added benefit of giving the engine a little bit of a more aggressive sound. If you’ve heard a 3.0T engine with a nice intake, you know how cool it sounds with the bark of that intake and the whine of the supercharger.

There are typically two kinds of aftermarket intakes for the 3.0T, closed, or open airbox. A closed system typically has some kind of baffling to enclose the air filter more completely, ensuring less hot air is entering the system from the engine bay, and helping to improve power while still damping the sound a little bit. Basically, you get the power without a lot more noise, so the car retains some of its refined character. A great example would be the Integrated Engineering Audi 3.0T Cold Air Intake

As you might guess, an open-intake will usually have a heat shield, but no complete airbox surrounding it. This really opens up the sound of the supercharger and you can hear the whine as you accelerate through the RPMs. An open-intake also tends to be a bit less expensive, so you can see power increases and get that aggressive intake sound for less money than a closed system. 

Conclusion

In the end, we can all agree that the Audi S4 and S5 is a great platform to modify. With a few of the upgrades from this list, you can turn either of these great cars from Audi into a more powerful, better handling, and more engaging vehicle. Perhaps best of all, with the massive number of performance parts and upgrades on the market today, you can choose to make your 3.0T S4 or S5 as wild as you want.