Good evening to all,
My name is Kev, I'm 24 from Gloucester.

I have recently purchased a Marea 2.4JTD 130 HLX Weekend.
For £350 I knew this was going to be a project car.
170,000 miles but the engine pulls well.

This is the second Italian car I have owned in the last year. I owned a Alfa 156 2.0 TS for a while and it was great fun.

I will be changing the car a lot as it is my project car,
Matt Black, lowered 30mm all round, Fiat Coupe 20vt Alloys, FMIC, new airbox and fit boost gauge and OEM oil coolers.

So if a meet happens in the local area I'm there.

is the marea orange? and did you get it from bristol way?

Funny that, yes I did?
Are you the previous owner?

Nope but a dude i know from fiatboo was Darren is his name, he just bought a mg zt cdti, i know the car very well, he bought it after using my weekends boot back in 2006 at donny south, nice car you got there and cheap as chips, he has done alot of work onit, and you can see his threads on fiatboo and on here, as regards to teh boost gauge are you fitting on the a pillar, just that i made my double gauge pod on my last marea and there pretty easy to do, FMIC i think may be a awaste of time, as they run pretty cool anyway and you will just get more lag, re-map of tuning box is the best start on tuning, infact i am going to use a tuning box on my stilo jtd multiwagon soon

also coupe wheels work very well, i use to run coupe wheels on my last car up till april and then changed them for some team dynamics monza r, low over coupe wheels work well, if you search on google for love for the unloved fiat, you sill see a feture that Suck Squeeze Bang Blow did on my car or check this link, this is a build thread of my old marea which i stupidly sold in may :-(

http://retrorides.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=readersrides&action=display&thread=113318

Many thanks for your reply.
It needs a little work on front suspension but bar that it's fine, and an engine pulley change.
I was a little bit dubious over a remap at first seeing how many miles the engine has done but she pulls like a train when I need her too and is producing 54mpg on work commutes! Not bad for the old girl.

The only reason I thought of FMIC was purely for the turbo and less heatsoak. I didn't realise it would create more lag, that's something il have to look into.
I owned 306 Dturbos & HDi's before so that's where the FMIC thing came from for me anyway.

After looking at the wheel arches on the rear, the 16" Coupe Wheels will need to have low profile tyres me guess is due to lack of space currently between tyre and wheel arch.

I will look into these tuning boxes, plug and play then are they? Any real gains?
Also as the airbox on these is of an odd shape is it worth fitting a aftermarket panel filter or try to run a cone filter?

Also another question, it's based on the Tipo platform same as the 156, are any of the brakes interchangeable or is their no point?

Sorry for all the questions I just trying to build up my knowledge.

as for the breaks i couldn't tell you but i know that he 20v and fiat stilo jtd 1.9 uses the same size discs, coupe wheels i run 205/50/16 tyres and my car was lowered 60mm and never had any rubbing, even when i went up to 17" there was no rubbing the arches are huge on the marea

I think the brakes on the 2.4JTD are the largest possible to fit from the Fiat/Alfa range without major investment with custom hangers to fit Coupe Brembos.

Edit: I've not seen the coupe hub carriers however so they might be a straight fit!

With 170k on the clock DMF problems would be my first worry, with cam/aux belt issues in 2nd.

I think with the exception of access to the timing belts, you'll find this car an easy and fun car to work with. Depending on what you're aiming to achieve, moderate improvements can be made with minimum cost and effort. The car already has a FMIC (I'm not saying it's central though!) so not much gains to get there.

Good luck with it!