VW Tuners in Sydney

[Bug_racer]

I'm not comparing Japanese to anything

I was showing that generalizing is pointless

ie, your comment that off the shelf tunes are rubbish compared to custom tunes in driveabity

Ive had a whole series of off the shelf tunes come through here not to mention I was a dealer for 2 and in my experience custom tunes will always be more favourable compared to off the shelf units . Considering I do more than bolt ons or when I do they are bigger turbo etc I find that unless you get the right hardware you'll probably run into issues .

Good for you.

So what you are saying is that when I take mine down the quarter mile, you'll judge the tune as less successful because I
a) am driving a manual
b) have never done any time on the strip?

I think I'll be at least a second off most DSG times. Nearly all of that will be down to my own lack of skill at launching.

At least with dyno figures you don't have that margin of error.

a) Id look at your mph not your time
b) unless your poor at shifting it wont affect your mph , if it does you shouldnt be driving a manual !

launching will give you a better time but not so much a better mph

Dynos have margin of errors as well ? Go back a few years and there are plenty of posts about dynos and discrepancies between mainline , dyno dynamics , mustang etc

I would sure hope your car would put out better figures than mine considering your additional modifications / money spent / time spent / and custom tune.

All parts on my car were installed by me, i dont trust anyone with my car except me.

Quarter mile times have never really interested me, and the closest drag strip is Eastern Creek which is nearly 3 hours away - too far for me to be interested.

It doesnt have that much more mods than yours , its just the way they were fitted would vary greatly

Good for you

Well if peak power is all your interested in thats great . Let me guess you went to the dyno day the other week but wont sign up for the VW drag day in a few weeks ?

I don't recall having ever driven any modern tuned VAG, be it off the shelf tune or custom tuned that drove unsmoothly/poorly in traffic. There would have to be something seriously intentionally wrong in the tune to cause that.

Custom tunes *can* have an advantage over off the shelf tunes; but let's put it this way - this then requires the tuner to be very skilled in tuning and to have custom tuned dozens of the same vehicle, to achieve the best balance of performance, whether:

* On the dyno
* At the dragstrip
* Launching from a standstill
* On a circuit over longer stints on a trackday
* In cold weather
* In hot weather
* In humid conditions
* At high/low elevations

If I were to take an R for the very first time and try and custom tune it myself (ie. not use DNA's tunes); I would be able to get it to run well in a few of the above conditions, but because I cannot simulate all the above conditions and don't have hundreds of other R's I have custom tuned to get feedback from, the end result, overall, would not be as good as that as of an off the shelf tune from APR/DNA/GIAC, etc. from which hundreds of cars were used as research/development into refining their tunes.

It took me 35 revisions over 9 months of custom tuning for my B5 S4 to get it to run well in all of the above scenarios for instance; would a custom tuner really spend more than a day on your car?

A lot of the cars I have come through here require more than a simple re-flash , once you start bolting on hardware it becomes a different ball game compared to a simple stage 1 with maybe and exhaust or intake . Getting the best driveability out of the car while gaining the power required becomes a real artform and thats why so few companies can actually make an off the shelf tune and be succesful with it . If you were to try and custom tune a stage 1 car your wasting your time cause your gains wont be a huge deal more than most of the other tunes on the market and the cost to do it would pretty much leave you in the red than actually make you a profit . Once you change hardware it becomes more a case of getting the most out of it while maintaining driveability , the longer you spend on it the more power your likely to find .

In regards to your S4 did you have any good alternatives that you know would have worked that were reasonably priced ? I know of a few kits and they arent cheap , not to mention the highest powered b5 s4 Ive seen was tuned by an IT guy in his spare time .

[DNA Tuning]

The B5 S4 is a different kettle of fish; I have tried a few off the shelf Stage 3 kit files and all of them were smooth but were also very conservative with everything. Not to mention they would start doing strange things with over 20psi of boost. Even DNA's wasn't great on my own car, but worked great on another customer's car of mine, etc.

Anyway, back on topic with the Golf R; why is there a notion or suggestion floating around that Lucas' car will not be competent down the strip? Just because it was not custom tuned does not mean it won't do a good time/trap speed. It's as though people want to believe that because the car pulled great numbers (and mind you, a smooth curve especially for a 2.0T+K04 car), that it won't be any good down at the drags.

[Lucas_R]

It doesnt have that much more mods than yours , its just the way they were fitted would vary greatly

Good for you

Well if peak power is all your interested in thats great . Let me guess you went to the dyno day the other week but wont sign up for the VW drag day in a few weeks ?

Peak power isnt of massive interest to me, nor are dynos in general or 1/4mile racing. I only attended the Sydney dyno day so that i could compare my car to a host of other tuned R's on the same dyno/same day etc. i knew the car felt quick, so i knew it would put out some good numbers that i could share with other R owners looking to tune their cars.

For the record, the DNA tune on my car is very smooth all through the rev range, from crawling in traffic to full throttle acelleration.

As mentioned previously, ive never participated in 1/4 mile racing or really even been interested in it, therefore i wont be attending the strip any time soon. Perhaps one day, but not in the near future. Given my car is a manual and is immediately disadvantaged when compared to a DSG in a 1/4mile dash, i would expect a low/mid 13 second time at around 102/103mph?? Im totally guessing here as no one that i know of has run a manual R down the strip.

[parso_rex]

I don't know how I seem to miss all these threads all the time...

When I first started doing the Euro's as in tuning them, via editing the file off the car, I thought it would be piece of cake but I can assure you its not, its so easy to get all confident about things being all rosy and great then you'll get one or two cars that just don't want to co-operate at all and you go backwards for a while - until you work out why. Infact its sort of good in that regard because I know it will be beyond the scope of many other workshops purely from a time availability (read COST) perspective let alone technically.For the present I will stick to the 1.8Ts and 2.0Ts purely because its all I have time for, I simply have so little time available for anything else atm and I still have an awful lot to learn too. Anything else is going to be a case of the best provider that I can assist via logging or whatever for whatever vehicle that is. At this point in time I have chosen to use Superchips and a northern European provider for the diesels. Superchips seem to be pretty good these days and I'm happy to send them proper logs for revisions of their files if required and they will modify things properly if need be and for the R's I think you will see some improvements on the dyno in the future in their stage3 ish files anyway with our hardware package anyway. The good thing is I can now offer people our own stuff and also something off the shelf because I've learnt that for some it's all they want anyway plus not everyone drives Golf Rs' or S3's (yeah I still don't get it either ).
Oh yeah those two cars that read lower on the April dyno day (Bens and Leons) were running track tunes btw, they were meant to be lower. Both are back to running their street tunes again now. I should have loaded up their other files for the day in hindsight perhaps.Ian will get his Scirocco's track file shortly too as he needs to be knocked down a peg or two.
We will continue to quietly hammer away on the strip and the dyno - its is the only way to prove things to the masses and to date we have blitzed the fields in both of these areas by a big margin so we must be doing something right. More importantly we're having a lot of fun in the process. It doesn't mean we are super intelligent beings or anything weird it just means we're investing the time and doing the job properly.

Mark

[Lucas_R]

Oh yeah those two cars that read lower on the April dyno day (Bens and Leons) were running track tunes btw, they were meant to be lower. Both are back to running their street tunes again now. I should have loaded up their other files for the day in hindsight perhaps.

Thanks for clarfying Mark. I dont know who Ben is or what car he had on the day, but i was referring to Leon's car (the other grey Golf R) and Michael's (zbeasty) black R. That explains why there was such a difference in power/torque from one car to another when essentially they were all running the same modifications and a custom tune. So do you mean they were running a toned down tune meant for a race track, or for drag racing?

[parso_rex]

Thanks for clarfying Mark. I dont know who Ben is or what car he had on the day, but i was referring to Leon's car (the other grey Golf R) and Michael's (zbeasty) black R. That explains why there was such a difference in power/torque from one car to another when essentially they were all running the same modifications and a custom tune. So do you mean they were running a toned down tune meant for a race track, or for drag racing?

Well with these two cars the power figures are almost identical I think one peaked at 207atw the other 208atw but its an aggressive tune and one you wouldn't want to run at the track all day on a hot day. For something like this you run a bit lower boost and if necessary reduced timing both of which aid in dropping the engine temps and on the track this is what you are up against. So in Bens case we dropped this to I think 24psi with a smooth linear delivery still running decent timing and so on and he was still able to overtake AMGs down the straight at wakefield, remember he has the smaller S3 intercooler too and this doesn't help when you are going all out. At the strip with his current original tune the smaller S3 FMIC doesn't heaksoak nearly as much as say my own THS/revlimit/Godspeed/insert-clone-here core so its actually going to be better and you can also see this clearly in cars like Sebs/courtney's R's 12.06@113 runs
For reference and also to upset people on the friday two days prior to the dyno day Gorans ran a 212atw so that sort of tells you where the dyno fairs in things, I'm glad it reads lower.
Leon's is a bit different he wanted something in between so we gave it to him but now after experiencing the bitter taste of defeat at the dyno day he's again seen the light and he's man enough to be running the full tune. I may do another revision for him however with a bit of smoothing -recall that he did have a Justin Bieber CD in the car during tuning and I have to factor this into the tune (while I am going off on this wild tangent I won't tell you what was in Goran's car at this stage but I do have the pics for future release if required.)
I am probably going to end up giving these guys the 11map capable mygenius beast so they can switch things around at their leisure but for the moment they just drop by the workshop or house and I switch it as required. In reality this might only occur once or twice a year
I left out Michaels car, he'd just modified his intake to run in from the drivers side straight into the turbo from the front and I have no idea what intake temps it was seeing in reality, I actually wish he had the original setup on there, its anyone's guess as to whether or not the MAF was seeing correct values with the new short path. We just have to log it and see whats happening, it may have even sorted itself out by now too.