560 crank hp MB C63 AMG vs. 610 crank TTS/MRC SC B7 RS4 = RS4 win right???

B6/7 S4/RS4
#41

frankly, your kit is the first one that actually looks like it SHOULD do really well of those that have come to market. The first three were basically pointless IMHO

VF - too small of a blower (FAIL)
PES - too small of a blower (FAIL)
MTM - insane pricing makes it an unrealistic option

The next four appear to have some promise.

APR - nice kit, but small blower doesn’t take advantage of RS4’s forged internals. Still, kit works well and delivers on promises. Still the only 11 second RS4s in the world are APR supercharged (11.8 @ 116 and 11.8 @ 119)
TTS - hardware looks great; software is going to be interesting as MRC don’t seem to have much of a track record with the 4.2
JHM - hardware looks great; software looks great (most accomplished tuner in business)
AMD - hardware looks great; software is a question mark as EPL like MRC have had ‘success’ (sales) with the 2.7T world, but haven’t got much of a 4.2 tuning track record

The last three have the hardware choice nailed. All have large capacity superchargers that flow enough air to make power that can test the internals of the RS4 (all are potentially 700 hp cars).

My car is a 2008 RS4. I just bought it a couple of months ago so it has no supercharger on it. I want to see your kit and the JHM kit and the AMD kit on the market for a while before I supercharge my car. While there will always be people willing to buy without proof of performance, I’m a bit more patient when it comes to this stuff.

Everyone is excited about this kit, the JHM kit and the

#42

That’s a great quote. Unfortunately the tuning companies tend to take it out on the forum members who demand more than fluff…and see it as a witch hunt or ‘hating’. Check out the B5 forums. They have seen more scams and tricks than any Audi platform…and the companies STILL get mad when people ask for more proof. This very forum has seen an influx of AMD customers here to defend the Tial B5 S4 kits and the AMD shop that builds most of them. They call the other members haters for wanting to see a quarter mile time that would indicate the kit is working well. I don’t get that.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing TTS’ kit develop. My prediction is that the hardware is great but as APR found, even good hardware doesn’t guarantee success if the tune is sub-standard (the first APR tune on their TVS1320 kit ran 12.6-12.7 @ 107-109. Barely faster than stock. Once CountVohn, a member of this site tuned it, the car went 11.8-12.0 @ 116-119. That’s all from the tune. Incredible.)

I can’t say I’ve been impressed by MRC’s ability to tune any 4.2 car, let alone one with a supercharger thrown in the mix. Their re-tune of the PES S5 kit produced zero acceleration gains vs. the regular PES tuned cars. This is understandable as they were all maxing out the blower so there wasn’t much upside. This kit has plenty.

In my mind, the only hurdle facing the TTS kit is the MRC tune. Hopefully they’re up to snuff. If not, CountVohn better keep his phone charged

#43

Not blowing the MRC trumpet but from what I have seen so far I am impressed with the detail they go to on tuning the V8, they made big gains on the TTS by systematic changes. I feel we still have a little more to come but until we get this damn clutch situation nailed its not going back on the dyno. Has anyone else had a problem with the auto adjuster locking down on high power cars? I spoke with another Ford tuning shop today and they hd the same issue and had to junk the auto adjust!

Regarding the 1/4 mile
Sakimano I see you have a best of 12.9 with a stock car, but I see its an RS4 not an S5. I did a best of 13.65 stock. I did a 12.7 with a slipping clutch and forgetting to switch off my EDS etc so had a very very slow 60’ I think it was around 3 seconds. It was at the GTi show which was not a drag strip but it was well set up and had laser 0-60mph which gave me a 7.2 second with the big bog off the line and I know now I can halve that. SOOOOO I am very excited about doing the 1/4 and hope to put this to bed :slight_smile: Here’s hoping for Sunday.

Clutch question
#44

hahaha 0-60 in 7.2? nice! (don’t post that again lol)

Honestly you guys should do just fine. You guys know how to drive and shift gears. Don’t try to be a hero on the launch. Try to launch at a low RPM level like 2900-3100 and get a few solid times under your belt. Launching much higher will result in tons of spin and much lower will bog. A nice launch around 3000 will net you a 1.8 60 foot (at the least) with the amount of power you’re making. From there, a good 1-2, 2-3, 3-4 shift will have you posting a good trap speed.

It will be interesting to see what you can do vs. say the PES car that Spinner drove there. He had a bunch of good mods, a PES MP90 kit and an MRC re-tune. He ran 12.58 @ 112 as his best I believe. That’s really your local benchmark. You should crush that. The APR car that ran 11.9 @ 116 over here is a nice comparison point as well. That was very well driven (great launch and gear changes) but the 116.9 MPH trap speeds indicate what 425 whp on an S5 can do. That’s about 500 crank hp. You guys are around 480 whp based on your dyno, so you ought to be able to push through 120mph. Not sure about your ET as that will depend on the driving.

My advice would be to get 2-3 shakedown passes in where you don’t break the car, but just get some nice passes in. Then as the day goes on get after it a bit more with trying different launch techniques and shift RPMs.

#45

Thanks for your advice, its a plan. Unfortunately it won’t happen this weekend. The clutch is in and it doesn’t even disengage. I won’t make any comments on this at the moment I am being very patient with the supplier!

#46

that sucks. Good luck with it.

#47

You have no idea of the frustration (where’s that smiley with a head banging a brick wall when you want one)

#48

dunno. but I hear it’s not the flywheel

:smiley:

#49

post up a log of 3rd gear maybe, logging blocks 003 and 021 for us. Would be interesting to compare.

#50

regardless what you run with that kit, please post it up and dont be shy. we all here want to see the advancement of the 4.2 and could guide you to what migh tbe going wrong. even if it lays an egg, the hardware is good and we can all help advance it along. the tts kit is gorgeous, better be for the price, but the level of engineering in the kit is jaw dropping.

as for that race, the c63 crushed it. customer of mine has a tuned c63 with cat-back and gutted cats (yes we did piggy pipes on a c63 lol) and it cant hold a candle to my car. he just ordered headers which we will be installing in the coming weeks, once he gets those in, ill get some pulls for you all on video but they would have to work a miracle to make up that kind of difference. if that rs4 is making the power it claims, he should annihilate the benz. but also being french, they are known to give up easily so that wouldnt surprise me either lol

#51

[quote=“91gl,post:50,topic:3163”]
ROTFLMAO!

#52

C63 + MHP headers (best) + MHP exhaust (one of the best if not the best) + tune = serious car

Not sure what mods are on the local car you piggied.

Look at the proliferation of MHP cars on this 10.X to low 11.X list
http://www.dragtimes.com/Mercedes-Benz--C63-AMG-Drag-Racing.html

As you can see here, they’re about 440-470 wheel horsepower
http://www.dragtimes.com/Mercedes-Benz--C63-AMG-Dyno-Sheets.html

I didn’t get clarification but it looks like the Benz didn’t have a passenger. To that end, the RS4 had 120 lbs of avant weight (vs. an RS4 sedan’s weight for example) working against it + it looks like 175lbs of extra passenger weight. 300lbs is no joke.

I think you’re right though, I also think the RS4 should have done better. That’s why I’m a bit worried about the MRC tune on the TTS cars. When the hardware looks right but the car doesn’t seem to do what you expect it to (think APR SC when it first launched), it has to be the tune. Hopefully this was just a case of not really being a great driver in the RS4 which was already fighting a weight penalty…and it was up against a very stacked low 11 second C63.

#53

FWIW… MHP powered C63 went 5.98 60-130 recently according to Andy at MHP… I know alot of folks don’t like them but I have known Andy for a long time and used to drag race Mustangs with him in the early 2000’s…

#54

good ron then you can tell andy and the rest of that bullshit company that they’re fucking thieves

#55

I hear ya, MHP headered MBs are no joke. They know what they are doing.

#56

maybe in the MB world but they’re damn good at bricking multiple rs4 ecu’s…

#57

Interesting… Do you have more details on this? You should post in the clutch question thread.

Clutch question
#58

Rich, I knew that wouldn’t sit well with you… I know Andy had a RS4 at one point and heard about some of the horror stories… I have no business dealings with him just used to race with him and still keep in touch… Sorry you got f***ed over…

#59

The merc is a fast as hell car for sure. I think we also have to add into the equation that as well as the extra weight the rs4 is also loosing a little more through the drive train with the 4wd system as well. I’m not sure what the normal losses are with the 2wd sytem on the merc. Does anyone know? Not trying to justify why he got beaten so badly but I wasn’t there so cant really comment. But I heavily suspect that on that particular video the driver played a large part in the distance at which he ended up at.

Regarding the tune and MRC. Based on what I have seen through the development phase of our kit I wouldn’t be quite so quick to jump on mrc and blame it all on the software. Obviously what with mrc being heavily involved with the pes stuff before, we where able to look in quite some detail at where the major issues where with there product as a back to back against our own. The obvious one as everyone knows is that the blower was just too small for the job. Couple that with what is not a very efficient supercharger (especially when you start over spinning it to the degree that some of there kits where) and that supercharger starts having to work pretty hard and with it starts generating allot of heat as its well outside its peak efficiency range. On top of this in my personal opinion the heat exchanger was not in the slightest bit optimised. The pre rad was I believe a cheap item that you can readily buy off eBay ect and the actual heat exchanger core in the manifold was pretty thin with not a great amount of surface area. These things all add up to a kit that would be capable of running reasonable numbers if you where to do a quick run on the dyno with a fairly cold engine, and maybe this explains why the dyno numbers never stacked up to the real world performance?
For sure the rs4 and s5 kits are heavily compromised because of packaging restraints, and this will always limit how effective the charge cooler system will be, but you only have to look at the size of the pre rad, and the depth of the cores in the TTS kit to notice that we have tried to optimize it as much as we possibly could. For example I know that on the road we could do a rolling start in 2nd gear and take it to the limiter in every gear and by the time we got into 6th we where just about hitting the same air inlet temps that mrc had seen on a hard pull in one gear with the pes system. These numbers are still what I would consider pretty high compared to a Well setup intercooler install but an intercooler was a definite no go unless you cut half the front of the car off  Couple this with the heat recovery time in the systems and you can start to piece together why the TTS system can work so much better, this is exactly why our system incorporates items such as the 6mm PTFE gaskets that separate the main plenum assembly from the heads. In testing we saw This makes a HUGE difference to heat recovery times as we are no longer using the aluminium plenum chamber as a giant heat sink for the engine :slight_smile:
Back on track…This is why in ’my’ belief mrc are not really to blame for the poor performance of these previous kits as it was more limited on actual hardware design rather than software. They just got hot so quick that you have to start pulling timing out to keep them safe.

That’s my take on it anyway. But please feel free to discuss it further as I would be interested in others opinions.

#60

^I don’t think anyone is going to say MRC isn’t a capable tuner b/c of their attempt to improve the PES kit’s performance. We all knew the kit was a failure before it ever bolted onto the car. Then when some impressive dyno numbers started coming out, it appeared that it might not be as black & white. But the resulting 1/4 times, and head to head pulls made it obvious that it was indeed what everyone suspected in the beginning.

What people are trying to say is that just b/c you have a great history in other platforms, or appear to really know your stuff, doesn’t always translate to other platforms (i.e. the RS4). This became blatantly apparent with APR’s S/C kit. To think about a company the size of APR, who only specialize in Audi/VW/Porsche, decided to make a dedicated supercharger kit for the RS4/S5, actually released and sold the kit to customers, and then found out that the tune wasn’t performing like the hardware should (and couldn’t figure out why or how to fix it), it became obvious that all the pieces don’t always fall together like you’d hope sometimes. Lack of tuning expertise was expected from PES/VF/Etc, but it was flat out embarrassing for something like this to occur to APR.

So no one is saying MRC won’t be able to tune the kit effectively, just that several have gone in with great track records, backing, and know how, but ended up with results that were lacking greatly.