nope lol and i said “look babe, at least it wasnt the s4” lol
If it was a ‘test unit’ and you knew this…why didn’t the shop who installed the unit make sure the kit was preforming on par…or do they have no standard to compare?
You apparently though it was running great, right?
…until you got raped by Auditude…then it was most definitely a ‘test unit’ on the super beta program with a lot of kinks to still work out…and somehow everyone is still suppose to forget APR has been screwing with this kit for years.
Pretty funny when you look at the situation and have no stake in the game…looks like a complete fucking mess.
yeah, all the stage 3 guys were saying their cars pull like freight trains etc. Until they got beat by stage 2. Then it was ‘you can tell there’s something wrong’
It’s neat how your biases fuck with your perception.
it was a test unit from the get go. i knew what i signed up for and never made it out to be anything but that. the car did/does feel good in certain situations and completely flat in others. I was asked to keep information off the internet till the kit was ready… but to be fair i didnt release any of that information 
for the record, before me and pete even did pulls i told him exactly how the car felt and said it felt strange. had him drive the car and the first thing he said was that the car felt really strong and was surprised about the outcome based on what he felt driving it. hence why to me the car “felt” great
richi - your situation frankly seems to be unique. While your dealer may have made it clear to you this was a beta product, that is NOT what was told to most if not everyone else. This was undoubtedly released as a final, finished product, for which customers paid the final, finished-product price of ~ $10 grand. That you had a unique situation going on doesn’t change those facts.
I can’t even believe this is up for debate. It’s very black and white.
That is a good point and correct.
Sounds like more than a little curb rash. My wife drives the B8 S4 with forgestars I bought mint for less than $1000 on kijiji (canadian craigslist). Best buy ever…
I got a set of titanium 5 arm rotors on ebay for $800 shipped! she took a turn to tight and clipped the curb on the rear wheel but she knows im crazy so she was very nervous to tell me lol
That’s funny. I think I have curbed all 8 of my wheels.
Found this quote funny given it uses the same Eaton TVS blower… It’s in regards to the Chevy Z06 that was tested for MT’s Best Drivers Car… Wonder if Magnuson is work on this issue as well? ;D
“It didn’t work. The damn Z06 retarded spark by 8 degrees, and the 1.7-liter TVS supercharger refused to make boost. No one knows why. Chevrolet came up with a “bad gas” theory, but Big Nasty got filled at the same Chevron stations as everyone else and even swallowed 8 gallons of 101 octane in an attempt to get the supercharger to wake up. No luck. What we have here is a failure to compete. What a pity. Allow me to explain why.”
http://www.motortrend.com/features/performance/2015_motor_trend_best_drivers_car/
Ha. That’s pretty wild. Sounds like a tuning issue, and at least APR can maybe take some solace in the fact that the big wig engineers at Chevy ran into issues too…
and that’s on a car with 6+ litres of displacement lol
I have been reading those and thought they were interesting. The Z06 also sucked in I believe a Car and Driver test. Then another one sucked on a Motor Trend Willow Springs test.
Maybe it was rushed to market for reasons entirely unrelated to the competition, since the competition doesn’t matter on product release timelines…apparently.
Can someone fill me in on how the stg 2 development played out before I picked up my car (sept 2012)? Did APR/GIAC/REVO immediately have the tune worked out with the pulley? I’ve read about Revo’s escapades, but how about APR/GIAC? I’d assume they heavily relied on guys like Ron/NWS4/Pete/Tvias to dial it in. Logs, revisions, races etc. Most of the guys I see on the 1/4 list are no longer around, so I’m curious on the timeline that lead to the platform being where it is today.
This question has been asked before, but how come someone can’t grab a 1740 from Magnuson and get GIAC/JHM/REVO to write a tune for it?
Mike, I can’t speak about the others but I can about APR… APR launched the pulley tune in very late June/early July 2011 not 2012. ECS had reached out to me to use the car for making some bling bling parts and offered to install the pulley, make an install video and dyno the car for free(I had to pay for the pulley from APR) in exchange for using the car… The car didn’t run right and I immediately contacted APR and I don’t know that they officially put it on hold but believe they quit selling it. The car would go to redline shift and then hangup, I have videos posted on youtube but I’m in the office so I can’t get to them. I immediately contacted APR and did logs, vids and talked with them to explain the problem. I think Neal(NWS4guy) also had the issue. There was no issue with manual cars. They got it corrected within a few days. So no it wasn’t correct from the get go and this is really because APR never tested it on a DSG car. I proceeded to then race the car and put up decent times but it was summer. Once fall came I started to see some boost bypass as I was logging all the time then and I reached out to APR and worked with them on a few revisions before IMO they finally nailed it. In total going off memory w/o all my paperwork here, I had the ECU down to APR 7 or 8 times in total since there was no port flashing then… GIAC followed I think the next year and Revo after them… Honestly, APR was almost always first to market on products, tune, pulley, cps, stageIII??? lol Hope this helps and let me know if you need me to clarify anything?
It would be a big outlay for something that comes with no guarantees of performance.
If I had the money (and no wife ;D), I would have bought one along with a meth kit and let MRC have a go at it. It’s just too much, especially when I have to factor in delivery and import tax to the uk.
Also owners were complaining of limp mode after a few laps on track. Can a mod delete my above, post?
Interesting, I’m just bringing this up trying to understand the precedent set for the platform regarding tuning development.
Since I’ve been following, one of the more interesting periods was between the 2013/2014 cars. We saw many people with 2014’s going to the strip and running very poor times. APR/GIAC etc. Some tuners came out and claimed it was due to the lower redline. Jim and myself did some simulations and hypothesized that the lower redline was only costing maybe .2 sec and 1-2 mph trap. Nothing like the near stock numbers we were seeing. Skywagon’s logs were awful as his ignition timing curve was stock-ish and this was with IAT’s well in check.
My point is that there are a lot of revisions of the ECU software, and it might not be the case that APR is able to write the correct software for everyone’s cars without writing some new files, having some back and forths with customers. APR doesn’t have factory source code so they can’t simply recompile to different ECM build targets. This is beyond my understanding, but basically, they reverse engineered the ECU by logging the car with extremely high resolution hardware/software tools and extracted where the tables/parameters exist within non-volatile memory. Ability to change fueling tables/cam phasing/timing tables (revo said the ECM interpolates between 3 tables based on measurements and calculations)/boost control. They then have a database of all ECU revisions, and overwrite the reverse engineered correction/calibration onto similar locations in memory for the other ECU revs.
The issue with that is OEM’s change software builds very frequently (even in-between MY’s), there are new standards in emissions, new DTC’s that need to be identified, other features that get introduced which require different ECM software. So basically, APR assumes the different ECU revision will react similarly to their software. Which it probably doesn’t.
So aside from Richi’s hardware issues with the CPS, there could also be something wrong with his tune? This is why we need a guy like Ron to run this kit (not saying that Richi isn’t working with APR to solve issues, but Ron clearly has access to the red phone). If it flops and doesn’t deliver the performance advertised, Ron will be pissed I’m sure, but also will understand that he was going with an unproven product. And the community will beit.
I’m don’t think there’s any doubt the tune needs some work. Preferably with some extra cooling that works at the same time.
The whole thing just shows how badly Magnusson whiffed on the launch. I really think if it would have been installed on 3-4 cars in different conditions with people willing to log and work with Mag/APR, this would be a completely different product. Ron was basically begging for it, and somehow it ends up on some dudes car in Cali that could give two shits?
I wonder if they would want to?
I wouldn’t think JHM would. Unless Magnusson paid them $50,000 or something.
I wouldn’t think GIAC would want to help Magnusson sell a kit with GIAC’s biggest competitor’s logo emblazened on the top of it (APR)
REVO? Why would you want REVO to tune anyfuckingthing?
You could certainly get a ‘custom tuner’ to do it, but as we’ve seen, most of them haven’t a clue what they’re doing other than showing off pretty dyno charts and fooling gullible customers.