Wolf in sheep’s clothing: Stage 3 S-Cross 1.6

Why the idiom in the title you might be asking? Well, the car has been tinkered with by ‘Wolf’ Performance Tuning & it is a white Maruti, the de-facto choice of the masses a.k.a. ‘sheeps’.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Now coming back to the topic, the thing that makes this car so special: The Fiat-sourced 1.6 Litre oil burner, a feisty little something in its own right but this owner decided to up the game even further.

An S-Cross build is one of the easiest, most affordable & reliable ways to get 200 bhp out of a car. For around Rs. 9 Lakh for the base vehicle & Rs. 2 lakh in mods, you can get yourself 200 HP & over 400 N-m. Quite the deal, right? More importantly, this is a diesel at the end of the day so the fuel economy is still going to be there & the torque is relentless, just there at all the times throughout the revband.

From the get-go, it produced a very healthy 120 HP & the engine was dubbed the ‘DDiS 320’ by Maruti for the bonkers 320 N-m of torque it made, still the highest figures from factory in its class. But this peculiar example here is even more crazy as it has been tuned to stage 3 so it makes a ridiculous almost 202 HP & 438 N-m at the crank! 201.69 (nice) HP & 437.61 N-m to be exact. Now those are some truly impressive numbers being managed on stock internals.

Below is a short summary of the car’s behaviour & performance at different ‘stages’ (*ba dum tss*) in its life, from the owner himself:

1. Stock:

Below average low end
Mental turbo kick
Good mid-range
Not much juice after 3500 RPM
0-100: 11.3 sec

2. Tune O Tronics Stage 1:

Decent low end
Slightly better turbo kick
Improved top end
0-100: 9.7 sec

3. Wolf Stage 2:

Very good improvement in low end
Minimal turbo kick
Linear power delivery
Good punch in mid-range
Decent gains in top end
EGR off
0-100 : 7.9 sec

4. Wolf Stage 3:

Slight drop in low end compared to Stage 2, still better than stock & stage 1.
Mental mid range
Brutal top end, car loves to redline

Coming to the main highlight though: a 0-100 km/h time of just 6.9 seconds, just plain mad!

Here’s a list of all the mods done to it for Stage 3:

All of the ‘plumbing’ i.e. pipework for both the intake & exhaust was done in-house at Engineering Exponent.

The Stage 3 tune was also specifically developed by the team at Wolf Moto Performance with all the R & D being done by them: a truly painstaking, slow & intensive process that takes a lot of patience, hard work, fine-tuning & constant fiddling of even the smallest of things.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Very few S-Cross’s have been tuned & even fewer are Stage 3 like this one across the world as none of the mods you see here were ‘direct bolt-ons’ as they say, like in the case of the Germans or even other Japs.

When it comes to the aesthetics of this specific example, you are not going to expect that this is the one making the noise by just looking at it because it’s just so unassuming. But, the owner still has done some very tasteful mods to it like xenon headlights, an Euro-Spec front grille & rims from its own ‘dad’, the SX4.

It has KYB dampers in the front & Monroe dampers in the back, it’s also on Eibach lowering springs with a 50mm drop. Hats off to the owner for driving with this setup on the infamous pot-hole-infested roads of Bengaluru.

As far as the driving experience is concerned of this modded beast, please do check out the video given below which is also available on the YouTube channel; driven by none other than our own Bhavneet Vaswani.

The 1.6 is a rare beast to find though as it was only sold for 2 years from the S-Cross’s launch in August 2015 to being discontinued in September 2017 when the facelift was brought out only with the 1.3 diesel engine option. The S-Cross already was a sales dud by the manufacturer’s standards owing to its sky-high price tag for its time, bland looks, a disproportionate front end (mainly the headlight design) in the pre-facelift version, sub-par interior quality with all its switchgear, the steering wheel, the infotainment screen, etc. all being shared with its much cheaper siblings from the infamous Suzuki parts bin also did not help as the public just said ‘Maruti keliye itna pesa kon dega?’ & moved on, forgetting this gem even existed in the 1st place. The presence of segment benchmarks like the Hyundai Creta & Renault Duster in the same time frame also gave a tough fight to the S-Cross for it to make a strong case for itself.