MBRP Armor Plus Cat-Back Exhaust with Y-Pipe; Race Version (15-23 Mustang EcoBoost Fastback w/o Active Exhaust)

Video Review & Installation

The MBRP XP Series Race Cat-Back that we have here today will hands down be one of the most popular systems currently on the site for the 2015 and newer EcoBoost owners who are looking to crank up the volume but still keep things reasonably priced. The XP is going to pack that 409-grade stainless steel throughout along with 3-inch mandrel-bent tubing and can be had for the mid to high $700 level. Install according to the site is gonna get a soft two out of three wrenches on the difficulty meter. Take a couple of hours or so to complete from start to finish. But if you hang with me for a bit, I'll walk you through that job later in the video. So, let's just jump right into things here, gang, and get into those sound clips as you heard at the top of the video. And listen, the MBRP Race is really going to deliver in the volume and tone department but at the same time still maintain I would consider a relatively deeper tone overall.So, going to my highly scientific wake-the-neighbor scale, I have the Race system from MBRP coming in at a healthy four out of five on my one to five or one to wake the neighbor scale. Again, a noticeable increase over stock that goes without saying but without being completely ridiculous, and the in-car levels or cruising levels still maintained a pretty mild tone overall with zero drone. Now, responsible for that sound, in this case, will be MBRP signature Race series mufflers here, straight-through by design, of course, allowing for increased flow but still tuned to create that relatively deep tone you heard earlier on. Now, that's important for me anyway because normally these four-cylinder EcoBoost engines can get a little raspy with other systems, especially more free-flowing systems, but that wasn't the case here in my experience. Now, all of your piping is 3-inch mandrel bent as you can see, and that does include the Y-pipe here, guys, and everything will exit out of these massive 4.5-inch tips, which are etched with the MBRP logo.Now, one more thing I do want to point out here, guys, is that MBRP does give EcoBoost owners some options with this Y-pipe in regards to how you want to connect to your downpipe. For instance, it does come with a factory neck down style connection as you can see, but if you really wanted to open things up, uncork the flow, get rid of that neck down, you could always modify the system right here. And at that point, essentially go full 3-inch from tip to tip as long as you're using a corresponding 3-inch aftermarket downpipe, which is pretty cool and something that's not always achievable with aftermarket cat-backs. Now, before I show you how to get this thing bolted up to your EcoBoost, I do wanna recommend checking out the 100-plus 5-star reviews back on the site for the Race series system from MBRP. Because as I mentioned earlier, this is easily one of the most popular systems for the EcoBoost crowd out there. And the ratings are really a good indication of that. All right. Now, it's time to give you guys a better idea of how to get this system bolted up to your ride at home. So, without further ado, let's head out to the shop and show you how it's done.Tools I use for this installation include a 3/8 impact gun, 3/8 ratchet, extension, 15-millimeter socket, 13-millimeter socket, and a 5/16 Allen key. Now, your obvious first step here, guys, is to lift and support your car, whether it be on jack and jack stands, or in this case, a lift. Now, with the car up in the air, we're going to start by removing the two 13-millimeter bolts securing these brackets back here towards the rear of the car. Now, we can move up to our clamp here that secures our factory cat-back to our downpipe and loosen these two 15-millimeter nuts here. We don't have to remove them all the way. We just want to make sure we can loosen those enough to loosen this clamp up. So, now with our forwardmost clamp loosened up, we're going to grab a buddy here. And what we're going to do is get the exhaust off of the brackets here that secure it to the rear subframe, drop the front of the cat-back itself, and then at that point, we can slide the rear of the factory cat-back out of these hangers. Now that we have the factory system uninstalled, we have a chance to lay it out side by side by the new MBRP Race system. And there's really no comparison, right?Like we talked about earlier on, 3-inch mandrel-bent tubing, essentially from tip to tip here, dwarfing the factory 2.5-inch tubing. Not only that, but as you can see, there's no more resonator now in place with the MBRP, so that's one restriction gone. And then, finally, the two big restrictions, the factory mufflers are no longer there, thanks to the straight-through by design Race mufflers from MBRP. And the cherry on top, of course, are these gargantuan tips with the MBRP, about 4.5 inches big compared to those puny stockers. So, just an upgrade in every sense of the word. So, now that you know some of the differences between the two, let's show you how to get this bolted up. Now, before we go ahead and hang the next part of the MBRP system, we are going to need to snag these two hangers off of our factory exhaust. Our first step of installing our MBRP system is going to be to install the lead pipe, if you will, or the resonator delete pipe immediately after our factory downpipe. Now, you're going to want to reuse your factory clamp here, which has already loosened up. And what we're going to do is basically install the new MBRP pipe into the clamp, tighten it up a little bit. We're not going to really fully hammer down on it yet because we still want some adjustment in this pipe here, but we're going to tighten it down enough so that this pipe will hold up in place.All right. So, here we go. We'll install this into our factory clamp. You can just snug up these 15-millimeter nuts for now. Now, you can install those hangers onto your MBRP pipe. We have one of our new 3-inch clamps here from MBRP. We're going to slide that over our mid-pipe first, and then go ahead and grab your next pipe and install it over the mid-pipe here using the flared end first. Once you have the pipe installed in the mid-pipe, you can go ahead and get this hanger up here. Put some weight off that clamp. Now, we're just gonna repeat that here on this side. Throw our clamp on our mid-pipe and install our next pipe. Now, we have our axle-back portion, guys. We're going to finish up by installing this part first into the hanger, and then we can make our pipe connection because we have enough play in the system. All right. Get that started. Sometimes it helps to spray a little soapy water in there or something like that. With our muffler hanging, now I can grab one of our clamps again, slide it over the pipe, and make our connection.Now, we're just gonna repeat that process on the driver's side. Start with the hanger, throw our clamp on the pipe, and then make our connection. Last but not least, we're going to throw our tips on. Now, granted we haven't tightened our clamps yet, we're going to save that to the very end, that way we can kind of tweak the system and get it perfect. But for now, we're just going to throw the tips on, we are going to tighten these up, and then we can go back and make our adjustments and get the tips situated exactly where we want them in the opening. So, now we're going to take our 5/16 Allen and just lightly tighten up the tip here. We are going to probably make some adjustments at the very end, but for now, we're just kind of want to lock it in place. And, again, we're just gonna repeat that process here on the driver's side, slide our tip over. You know, just kind of get it at least straight up and down for now. We'll make some final tweaks at the very end. And tighten it with our 5/16 Allen. Now that our tips are on, we can go ahead and tighten up some of our clamps to really try to lock down the tip in our desired location. The big factor here will be this immediate clamp right behind the axle-back. So, what you want to do is kind of get it in place, hold and tighten at the same time.Now, repeat that process on the other side, kind of position it perfectly, and while holding it in place, grab your 15-millimeter socket and gun, and go ahead and tighten down your clamp. Now, we're just gonna work our way on back, tighten up these two clamps next, and then re-snug up the clamp nearest the downpipe. And now, we're going to finish up with the factory clamp. Again, 15-millimeter socket. Now, we can reinstall our 13-millimeter bolts to secure the hangers to the rear subframe. And tighten them down. Now, our final step is just to kind of perfect where our tip location is. Some of you guys might prefer them to stick out a little bit more. Some of you guys might like to tuck them in a little bit more. That's totally your call. I'm pretty happy with where ours are sitting now. So, again, I'm gonna take my Allen and do our final tighten-up.Hey, we hope you enjoyed this review and install of MBRP's XP Race Series Cat-Back Exhaust for your 2015 and newer EcoBoost Mustang at home. And keep in mind, for more cool products and videos like this, keep it right here at americanmuscle.com.