Bargain or not !

[Fctaff]

i have seen many a discussion on tuners, gains, cost and such. Some swear but the big tuning houses others looking at mobile tuners and budget.. Who is right, are the budget maps as good as the premium, can a man in a van hold his own against the power houses of the industry !

This is what I have been putting to the test.... Comming soon my findings on maps from budget to premium.

I asked I asked arguably the most well known premium tuner about the cost diferance and his answer was simple. R&D .... Thousands of hours of research and development to ensure their product is faultless.

Think of it like brain surgery, as that is effectively what your ECU is to your car. Man in a van potentially being a quack compared to the premium consultant.

 

[skiptowncat]

Depends on the tuner/car and/or device.
Personally mapped a few Mazda mps' from my bedroom (including my own up to 515bhp) via data logging.
The software is needed to write the tunes though, we had the choice of Cobb or versatune. Both had their merits and gave pretty much the same results.
I could tune the cars to have more power than you could get with an off the shelf flash tune as I tailored it for the individual car.
Large tuners tend to not push it as much, as they need a "one size fits all" type of thing to cover fuel differences or hardware changes

 

[skiptowncat]

I will add that the process can take a while.
Email me data log, I adjust tune and email back. They flash and log again.

 

[Fctaff]

I will start this review off on Monday, busy getting ready for Donington.

Part one of this has been put up before but the rest is new, I'll put up part one again to start the narrative.

 

[Chris90]

man in a van tuners annoy me....not one of them will even start the process of mapping a car properly. Not to mention the fact that they have no rolling road to assess how the car is behaving prior to even loading a map onto it.

Chances are, they will come out, lift bonnet, look, say all is ok without even knowing what the check, flash a file on with some ebay tooling and maps and take your £200 5minutes later.

No smoke test, no underbody checks, no through pipework checks under the bonnet, no prior data logging.

Road mapping is great, and good fun, however, data is never as precise as seeing the output of changes from a rolling road graph. Data can read the same, and power be made up from timing or tweaking other maps in the engine. Data looks right and good, but differences in power can differ.

Lets face it, anyone can buy a 99p cable off the internet which will write a map file, and find someone to supply them a file for £25-50 and flash it on.

Decent tuners and mappers (not map flashers), will know exactly how the ECU works, what maps need to be altered where, and will be able to write you a custom map for your car whilst checking changes against rolling road graphs and data.

 

[skiptowncat]

man in a van tuners annoy me....not one of them will even start the process of mapping a car properly. Not to mention the fact that they have no rolling road to assess how the car is behaving prior to even loading a map onto it.

Chances are, they will come out, lift bonnet, look, say all is ok without even knowing what the check, flash a file on with some ebay tooling and maps and take your £200 5minutes later.

No smoke test, no underbody checks, no through pipework checks under the bonnet, no prior data logging.

Road mapping is great, and good fun, however, data is never as precise as seeing the output of changes from a rolling road graph. Data can read the same, and power be made up from timing or tweaking other maps in the engine. Data looks right and good, but differences in power can differ.

Lets face it, anyone can buy a 99p cable off the internet which will write a map file, and find someone to supply them a file for £25-50 and flash it on.

Decent tuners and mappers (not map flashers), will know exactly how the ECU works, what maps need to be altered where, and will be able to write you a custom map for your car whilst checking changes against rolling road graphs and data.

Whilst I agree with most of what you say, I think live road mapping is better than doing it on a dyno. Seeing as most of the time you are driving on a road.

 

[Chris90]

True, nothing wrong with tweaking a car on the road after a dyno. However, a dyno will give more depth to any changes that your butt dyno might not be able to detect..

 

[aragorn]

A dyno gives far more control over the process than road tuning does.

A dyno can hold the engine at a specific RPM for instance and allow you to apply varying loads whereas on the road applying load causes the car to accellerate and thus the RPM's are constantly moving around. It allows you to actually focus on tuning the engine, rather than trying to get meaningful data while hurtling down the road at 150mph and trying not to die or get arrested.

I would never have my car tuned by someone who insisted that road tuning is better. They're either incompetent, stupid, or dont have a dyno and are trying to cover their ****. If its all you've got, and your doing the best you can with what you have available, then fine. But trying to claim its better is nonsense.

And sure, some road logging AFTER the cars tuned to ensure it behaves correctly on the road and theres no oddities, makes sense and is a good idea.

"Man-in-a-van" types vary wildly. Bear in mind theres not actually that many people capable of writing their own code. Most of these guys are buying the maps in, and if they happen to be using a decent supplier then the map should be decent. However you've no idea what your getting. If your man-in-a-van uses Revo or similar, then you can be reasonably sure that the software itself is decent. If they're buying in maps from a ****** that barely knows what hes doing, well you can guess the outcome... As mentioned they often wont bother doing a full array of checks, but for a basic stage 1 map on a fairly new car thats otherwise healthy, more often than not you'll be fine. The big concern is where you end up with some undetected pre-existing faults, especially on older cars where things are beginning to wear out and age, and a map written by an idiot that has disabled or messed up the many ECU protection routines, thats when your risking big bills and broken parts.

 

[Fctaff]

All this is covered in my upcoming article, it will lay out in some detail what you get for your money. It will also go into the mapping process itself, it should go some way to people understanding more of what you get for your money.

I was at Vag tuner at Donington with performance Audi magazine talking to Eibach about R&D they are constantly testing on the track, in passing he said without fail, REVO has been their testing at the same time. He said he has never seen any company test so much.

Testament to this was, they ran the REVO cars hard all day long at Donington, flogged them like dogs, drove them like they stole them, can emphasise enough how these cars were beasted all day. I was out on track toward the end of the day and still ran like a watch. That is what R&D gets you !

 

[skiptowncat]

A dyno gives far more control over the process than road tuning does.

A dyno can hold the engine at a specific RPM for instance and allow you to apply varying loads whereas on the road applying load causes the car to accellerate and thus the RPM's are constantly moving around. It allows you to actually focus on tuning the engine, rather than trying to get meaningful data while hurtling down the road at 150mph and trying not to die or get arrested.

I would never have my car tuned by someone who insisted that road tuning is better. They're either incompetent, stupid, or dont have a dyno and are trying to cover their ****. If its all you've got, and your doing the best you can with what you have available, then fine. But trying to claim its better is nonsense.

And sure, some road logging AFTER the cars tuned to ensure it behaves correctly on the road and theres no oddities, makes sense and is a good idea.

"Man-in-a-van" types vary wildly. Bear in mind theres not actually that many people capable of writing their own code. Most of these guys are buying the maps in, and if they happen to be using a decent supplier then the map should be decent. However you've no idea what your getting. If your man-in-a-van uses Revo or similar, then you can be reasonably sure that the software itself is decent. If they're buying in maps from a ****** that barely knows what hes doing, well you can guess the outcome... As mentioned they often wont bother doing a full array of checks, but for a basic stage 1 map on a fairly new car thats otherwise healthy, more often than not you'll be fine. The big concern is where you end up with some undetected pre-existing faults, especially on older cars where things are beginning to wear out and age, and a map written by an idiot that has disabled or messed up the many ECU protection routines, thats when your risking big bills and broken parts.

I always found the load calcs on the data logs to be off when logging a dyno run, maybe it was the dyno?
It is better for fine tuning ignition timings though.

But who doesn't like doing WOT logs in 4th gear!

 

[Chris90]

Depends how good your rollers are as to how much load you can put on them through a eddy brake. Most sets of rollers will be able to offer greater load than what you would get running a car up in 4th gear.

Used to enjoy road mapping my golf in 4th/5th....120-130mph was always good fun.