Darkside Remap/Experience

If your thinking of going to Darkside I'd say go, been three or so times but things have changed allot so here's my long winded unbiased review:

The New Gaff
At the last place it was basically a case of if your waiting for your car you have to walk around the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold but now they have a nice warm reception with wifi, TV, plugs to charge your phone and all sorts which is much better, however they take your car behind locked gates so when they're mapping it or whatever else you don't get to see anything until it's done which is a bit annoying if you wanted that experience.

Service Jazz
They say before coming you should have everything up to scratch (tyres, brakes, etc, basically it should be good for the road) and if anything's out of place they will generally sort it. They swapped a few bits and bobs on mine like brake bits also they use there sister company SRS Automotive (which is next door) for used parts and of course use there own upgraded parts wherever possible. So yeah service was second to none and the actual labour and mapping prices were allot better than I expected this time. I'd go as far as to say they were cheaper than most other places which is surprising considering allot of things they sell are double the price of an unbranded item.

Experiance
As I say if you want to see mapping and dyno's and feel involved maybe go somewhere else but if your not hung up on the experience and just want the end result they'll print it off for you on thick paper when they're done. They use a Dyno Dynamics dynamometer (not sure if they did before?) which is supposedly a "heart break dyno" and people say if it's not dead on it might be slightly under.

Remapping
Amongst all the other things they did for me mine was remapped, feels a little bettter now but wouldn't say it's night and day difference to how it was before (although it was already mapped before from somewhere else), however this is only my first evening with the car so I may change my mind as I drive it more.

Problems so far
So yeah I'm hoping this will either sort itself out or someone here will be able to shed more light on what this could potentially be but it went into limp mode two or three times on the way back... it was doing this before but I just put it down to being a crap map... could still be but I seriously have no clue, guessing I need to check codes or something.

Under the hood
My car is a 1.9tdi saloon with a BV43 turbo, front mount intercooler, turbo back straight pipe, EGR deleted and simplified, plus supporting stuff like pd150 head studs, B5 RS4 solid engine mounts, 2.5tdi snub mount... maybe more stuff I've forgot.

Results
So yeah without further ado here's my print out, not chasing figures but to be honest I'm pretty disappointed with the bhp figure as I was expecting 200's. I'd imagine it would read 190 on other dyno's and a few serviceable items could do with changing but other than that if anyone could chime in with any suggestions of what could be up they would be much appreciated.



Oh and yes, yes that is more torque than a S4, Golf R, etc

Just realised allot of that sounded very negative, these are great blokes who really know there stuff and don't cut corners, everything's to a high standard the only part that bugged me was the print out but that would probably read 190+ on other dyno's.

Gazwould said:

Poor horses , I'm just a few less with std turbo .

Why on earth did you take it there for .

They are king of the torque spike and you have a mountain , oh my eyes , that's a BAD map .

What clutch do / did you have ?

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Yeah but what kind of dyno was yours on?

Took it there as I had a few things that needed doing and they were the only one's I could think of with all the right bits that could stick them together and map it too.

Where do you recommend? Any pictures of your dyno?

5 speed box with Sachs SRE clutch.

I'm thinking maybe it's just engine health or something, it did suffer my dad putting petrol in about 6 or so months ago although it's been brimmed with premium diesel and a decent additive ever since, had all fuel/oil filters and serviceable items swapped since then too. Apparently it's also not 100% flush between the turbo and manifold (which they were going to sort but didn't have time) so that needs sorting (but it's close as it could be for now), apparently our engine's don't have gaskets between the manifold and turbo so it needs sanding?

desertstorm said:

Lack of horses may be related to the reason it's going into limp mode. either over/ under boost you need to check the fault codes. I had a BV43 on my 1.9 PD Passat B5.5 estate with some other mods like exhaust, intercooler etc and that made 210bhp on 2 different dynos. It ran a 14.9 93 mph quarter at Santa Pod and was fairly nippy. I mapped that myself.
A BV43 should make around 205-215 bhp all day depending on what's on the car and the general health of the engine.
Personally I wouldn't take a car to Darkside to get it mapped. I have seen some of their work , There are much better tuners around.
certainly not one of my best runs but there was around a 20mph headwind you can see the flags blowing and hear the wind and also they had just reopened the track after it had rained so it was pretty slick. But you get the idea, goodbye Mr S2000

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Ah right cool, lookin' good I'd love to be quicker than an S2000, I'll get one of those cheap bluetooth fault code reader things and see if that says anything.

Where would you say to go?

I saw your Midlands VW graph which looked good but they don't do custom maps anymore.

Your B8 A4 thread said you were tempted to get it mapped at Darkside except they didn't have a four wheel dyno which was probably another thing that made it an easier choice in my mind.

adamss24 said:

As Karl mentioned above, dark side are good but not the best place to go for diesel mapping - they keep the torque/bhp low to minimize wear on engine. The bv43 will do 20bhp extra but with extra duration which increAse PCP in the engine.

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Ah right cool, I thought it was the other way around and they were all about numbers but I suppose they wouldn't want to be responsible for killing cars that they don't own.

Gazwould said:

Same as you , Dyno Dynamics , strangely , they're very realistic .

Std turbo , special clutch preserving map
( super smooth , not high torque) .

The outside temp was 27°C and inside the dyno cell was 29 , so room for improvement on the figures on a cool day .

Your air intake temp is 13°C .

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I know you said it's clutch preserving but if I'm reading that right at 105ft lb it seems a bit extreme.

Does seem a good map though, have you had much else done?

Haha I'm lost with all this dyno reading melarkey, top line goes up to 180ish so I figured you read it the same for torque.

desertstorm said:

First time I have seen the actual dyno graph as I was at work last night and it blocks images from certain websites. Have they mapped it as a BV43 ?.
182bhp is fairly lame. The torque map looks like a cross section through the Alps. They are small turbos so do spool quickly but thats daft.
I did say in my B8 build thread I was looking for a tuner and mentioned Darkside but that was 3.5 years ago. After looking around and speaking to a few people I realised there were people much better at tuning diesels especially more modern ones like the 3.0 TDI with the EDC17.
Rick at Unicorn Motor developments in Stockport is where I would have taken it to get it mapped.
This was my Passat with the BV43 which was initially mapped by Custom Code at Midland VW.

There are 3 traces on there one is with normal software, the other is a phase 1 map for a standard turbo and the third is the custom code map for BV43. All done with the same hardware on the car BV43 , intercooler , decat and straight through rear box. So the stock run at 140bhp is quite reasonable.
I was dissapointed not to make 200bhp and after investigation concluded that there was an issue with fuel flow from the tank so cleaned the strainer in the fuel tank pump and a few other things. I then looked into how to map it myself using EDC15 suite. After much tweaking I ran it on the Midland VW dyno and it made just over 210bhp with 1.8 bar boost, and not going daft with fuelling so it didn't smoke too much. Just a grey haze when flat out.

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No idea, maybe they did map it for the stock turbo? I did tell them all the mod's and you'd of hoped they would have noticed all the bits and bobs either way as this is there area of expertise.

This might sound daft but are boost spikes bad? I'm pretty lost with them but from reading a bit online I got:
"A spike in pressure can be a desired effect as it gives the engine a large increase in midrange torque without placing a lot of strain on the engine as the higher boost pressure is only reached momentarily at mid rangeRPM rather than having that boost level all the way through the rev range. Some cars from factory have boost pressure spikes to make the engine feel more responsive and powerful in the midrange."
EDIT: Actually rereading that doesn't this mean the car will have lag with boost spikes? I'm lost.

Your map does look much better than mine! Maybe I need to clean the strainer in the fuel tank and possibly more, if yourself of absolutely anyone has any suggestions please let me know as I really want to break into a number that begins with a 2. I don't suppose you have the map or if there's any way I could do anything with mine as this is really making me want everything good to go to make the right numbers now.

Ah right cool hopefully it'll adapt then, maybe I'll get it up on another dyno to see if it's any different. Ah I think that makes sense so the less it spikes the more consistent the power is.

DrStrange said:

Great unbiased write up.

Im a little out of my depth with the comments above but in laymans terms..gotta say it all boils down to the mapper at the end of the day. You seem to have the correct supporting mods so surprised you didnt see 200bhp EVEN with a supposedly 'conservative' map.

Anyways, Ive been following 2 performance diesal companies;

1 - NarcoTuning - Supposed to be very good, specialise in VAG diesel. In Coventry about 30mins from you.

2 - DervTech - Now ive been following these guys for 2 year on facebook. Literally thousands of reviews. All top rated. SO many uploads with videos and quite frankly amazing tuning. Known to go for 'safe maps' but at the same time get fantastic power. Specialise in BMW but do loads and lods of VAG.
Based in Manchester.

..but no I dont work for them haha.

If it was me, I would go to Rick at Unicorn or DervTech handsdown.

Ps. The only thing i can think of which prohibits power which you may see on your set up (but probably like 1-5%) is the fact that your exhaust set up is pressure bent and not mandrel. In a nut shell, the smoother the bends in the exhaust the quicker the gas gets out. With kinks and smaller bore diameters at the bends, it may reduce power a tiny bit.

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Cheers, yeah I'm a bit lost too just trying to get everything good to go as I thought everything was sweet but there must either be something amiss or maybe there map is not so good. May check out Narco some time in the future as Darkside said Narco buy allot of stuff from them, also said there dyno runs a bit high so I'd be interested to see what it comes in at before they touch it (that's if I'd let them, would only really be interested if it came at sub 190 on there dyno, hard to tell whether Darkside were just trying to diss them), interested in pretty much anywhere/anyone who can figure this out to be honest. Exhaust should be alright I think, could get a side exit or maybe screamer pipe for a tiny increase but I don't think it would make much odd's plus I really like how the car sounds at the mo'.