After 4 years of sitting on a shelf in my garage, I finally got around to swapping out the OEM exhaust manifolds and cats in favour of a set of DC sport headers w/ cat delete. Headers hook up to a Tubi that I have run for the last few years. I had no appreciation of how loud this recipe would be. Wow. Jury still out on whether or not it's palletable. That aside, I am seeing a host of black soot on the rear quarters and rear clip. Clearly exhaust. As part of the install, I had to lengthen the leads for the O2 sensors to meet the new bung location on the headers. I have no CEL showing, but have not run a scan to see if the O2 sensors were/are working correctly. When they were removed from the OEM manifolds, they looked nice and clean without carbon build-up. Just like a clean set of plugs. The car ran fine, performed strong, and never smelled rich. Now it still performs as well as I can ever tell, but clearly is running rich (smell and visual soot). 'Could' a cat delete cause it to run richer then OEM set-up? Could the extended lead on the O2 somehow unknowing cause this? Is that a casulalty of swapping the restrictive manifolds and cat delete in lieu of aftermarket headers? I would appreciate wisdom from those that have done the swap prior to automagically swapping out O2 sensors that appeared to be working just fine prior to having their leads extended.
Thx
Thx
