Engine downsizing is a standardized practice for the standard passenger car market, while it is a more recent approach on the high performance engine side, due to the potential loss of appeal that could derive from the displacement reduction for the specific application. Nevertheless, a trend can now be seen in this market segment,where a new generation of highly downsized engine with specific power outputs around or above 150 HP/litre is emerging. The increased in-cylinder pressure in SI engines has always been limited by the arising of abnormal combustion phenomena, which are considered nowadays one of the most severe performance limiters in SI engines. To prevent, or at least limit, the risk of knock onset, charge cooling by means of the adoption of fuel-rich mixtures is usually applied. Despite the implied reduction of engine efficiency (or related increase of specific fuel consumption), mixture enrichment is preferable to the reduction of either the SA or the boost level, since these last are responsible for the amount of indicated work. The use of very rich mixtures is also effective to limit the exhaust gas temperature at turbine inlet.An alternative option to avoid fuel-rich mixtures could be the use of water injection to achieve the same charge cooling effect with reduced gasoline amounts. While frequently dismissed as simply a remedy for poor intercooling,the benefits of water injection stretch beyond simply cooling engine intake air, and can lead to more power than intercooling alone. The application of water cooling is not a novelty in internal combustion engines, and the first studies on its potential on knock inhibition can be traced back to the early 1930’s studies of Sir Harry Ricardo.Much later, a limited number of road vehicles with large-displacement engines from manufacturers such as Chrysler have included water injection. Saab offered water injection for the Saab 99 Turbo. With the introduction of the intercooler the interest in water injection disappeared.Water injection may improve not just power output and emissions, but also fuel economy, if carefully included in the design and optimization process of the engine. To confirm this statement, the proposed activity aims at using water injection in the intake port to reach the same knock limited condition as a rich-mixture operated engine , while injecting a stoichiometric amount of fuel (thus reducing fuel consumption) and trying to maintain (or even increasing) its brake performance. Since the presence, although modest, of an inert such as water simultaneously affects both the laminar flame speed and the end gas autoignition tendency, an optimized injection strategy was found with the help of 3D-CFD simulations for both water and gasoline in order to maximize the ignition delay of the end gases while limiting the reduction of the laminar flame speed due to the increase of EGR.