Why do you think a decrease on a stopwatch?
Nothing might be broken now, but there is nothing saying that there isn’t a component on the road to failure even if Stage 1 doesn’t affect that. I need Audi to partner up with a tuning company and offer a map, which won’t ever happen. It’s inevitable in my 4-6 year expected ownership, I will have a good few claims on the engine / drivetrain, knowing my luck.
With the separate ECU, but it wouldn’t be untraceable. Surely the ECU’s record data for a period of time? If my car breaks down at the side of the road, I swap the ECU.. Audi plug the car in, see no engine data for months....??
A decrease on the stopwatch? Figure of speech, you increase power by 5-10hp, you won’t feel it but it may reduce your 0-100mph time by 5/100 of a second. Hence the decrease on a stopwatch statement.
You’re asking about intakes but you don’t want to tune the car? If you did have a failure with an intake fitted, you would lose your warranty as the airflow going into the engine has changed from OEM spec.
You are over thinking things by about a factor of 10 and just guessing what may happen. If there isn’t a TD1 flag, your ecu would never be sent to Germany for investigation, that costs a lot of money, a lot of time, it’s forensicially broken down. Yours wouldn’t flag TD1 with a secondary ecu so why would you think that they would bother forensically investigating your Ecu? It’s Audi Germany, not the CIA.
There’s a hell of a lot of scaremongering on car forum sites, people guessing, making things up in their heads and trying to convince themselves and others that it’s all doom and gloom and Armageddon. If your ECU is standard, there is no further investigation, they sign off on the new engine and it’s replaced. Simple.
Also you are being overly cautious on the tuning front, Hank Iroz is running close to 800hp on his RS3 so what makes you think that a stage 1 480hp tune is going to break? The failure rate for Stage 1 maps must be in the ratio of high tens of thousands to 1. I’ve been around the forums for about 15yrs now and Stage 1 tunes just do not break cars. Unless there is an inherent fault known, like the Golf R turbo issue (those failed on standard cars too) - On this new engine, there are no such issues known.
I take it you went for the extended 4/5yr warranty then? A lot of people would probably choose year 2-3 to tune the car based on probability. Standard warranty is up at 36 months, tune at say 30 months and you’re risking 6 months. Tune at 3 months and you’re risking 33 months.
The engines and transmissions will cope with Stage 1 and 2 no problems. It’s stage 3 and beyond is where you may start to see premature failures. This is just my opinion and based on my experience but of course, you tune the car, there’s always a risk. You have to pay to play at the end of the day.
For me the risk is worth the rewards. Stage 2 FL RS3 is Audi R8 V10+ quick. At a fraction of the cost.