Thanks for all the feedback. So far confirming my intuition that gears are my best bet if I'm going to choose between the two... Really excited about what this could do for acceleration and fun around town. Maybe headers could be next year's project?
For the headers and cats, not sure about the DKF option as I seem to recall the smog guys checking under the car with a mirror before hooking up the OBDII test last time I was there. Similar worries for any custom solution, and I also have concerns that the show would screw up and leave me with a useless section 1. Good to know that I wouldn't need the tune with the euro cats, but this just seems like so much money for what it is, no? Maybe this is a dumb question, but if I installed something like the Fabspeed headers here (
VAC Website), could a tune trick the computer into not throwing a CEL and also returning a "readiness" state for all sensors? Can't seem to find the answer to that one.... Maybe I'm just missing something?