Does your vehicle deliver optimum performance from the moment it leaves the factory floor?

The answer is easy – it doesn’t.

No mass-produced vehicle ever does.

This special feature focuses exclusively on the Steve’s Auto Clinic group, leaders in the field of automotive power enhancement services.

A journey through these pages will be one of fascinating discovery to anyone who has ever wondered: How can I unleash more power from my vehicle, yet do so safely and reliably?

Manufacturers design and build vehicles along mass-manufacturing principles, with products aimed at the public at large, and not at the individual.

But the fact is, just about every production vehicle has the potential to become far more powerful and fuel-efficient when individualised in the hands of a true expert – without compromising quality or durability.

“In fact, a carefully researched and developed power enhancement package may sometimes even render a vehicle more reliable than the mass-produced version, especially in cases where the non-optimum design of a part has been carefully identified and subsequently upgraded or replaced during the enhancement process.

But thanks to our well-established network of interwoven facilities, such as workshops countrywide and divisions for development, engineering and manufacturing, vehicle owners are increasingly realizing the almost endless possibilities of individually-tailored power enhancement.”

Steve Fischer – founder and director of the group’s parent company, SAC Holdings.

In the hands of SAC, the power enhancement industry has reached an unparalleled level of maturity – a remarkable story, given that Steve’s Auto Clinic was originally launched as a small tuning shop in Vanderbijlpark in 1983.

Right from the outset, Fischer was firmly committed to a strict set of principles – principles that, 20 years later and with the benefit of hindsight, have been proven correct.

Nine branches have been established countrywide – more are on the way – with specialised divisions that focus on product development, engineering, manufacturing, trucks and electronic enhancement.

Among the founding principles, for instance, is the fact that not every car is a race car. In an after-market “conversion” industry that so often gives little consideration to reliability issues of power-enhanced vehicles, SAC took the opposite stance.

The company realised from day one that reliability, as a concept was synonymous with road-going vehicles – be they petrol or diesel driven, passenger cars, light commercial vehicles or heavy trucks.

It is all too easy for the layman to push the limits of an engine conversion beyond the reliability threshold – a pitfall that the enhancement experts at SAC avoided throughout the company’s 20-year success story.

Furthermore, unlike most players in this industry, SAC steered away from experimentation with customers’ vehicles.

“We pride ourselves that SAC’s technical staff are truly experts in their respective fields, a fact which has contributed significantly to the company’s credible stance in the marketplace today.” Fischer says.

Another firm SAC principle is simply to employ the very best people available, be it personnel found in the workshops, in the development arena or the engineering and manufacturing divisions.

“We physically buy our own new vehicles with which to develop product-specific power-enhancement packages.

The end result is thoroughly tested, evaluated and re-developed if necessary, before such a package is offered to the owners of similar vehicles,” Fischer explains.