Also, as far as I know everybody I mentioned is still there.
A prominent APR employee.
No.
To be fair, it does seem as if my previous post invited further scrutiny upon his actions and either he’s ceased his actions or simply taken it further underground.
Dave
Yep, the boost gauge is a turd. It was in the works for 1.5 years and was a project that was terribly mismanaged by a particular engineer after he was given an overseas contact by another employee. Overseas = huge margins if you haven’t noticed by this point.
At the end of the day, they couldn’t go without the vague “0” area (because the gauges go out of calibration easily) and the engineer in charge didn’t have the foresight to make the gauge read up to 35psi. What’s the point in making a gauge go up to 30psi when you provide a 3 bar MAP and many APR tunes will peak above 30psi?
Even one of their sales guys posted a video of his APR gauge continually pegging 30psi.
Whoops!
lol didn’t notice the “0” area, wow.
I should point out that there are many signs that this employee is the same person who posted last year under the screen name “JRed”, from APR HQ after routing it through overseas proxies. 
http://audirevolution.net/forum/index.php?topic=2757.msg78370#msg78370
[quote=jred]To add to this thread, here is some actual first-hand information and facts to throw in. Won’t reveal how i have this info, so take it as you wish, but believe me this is first-hand.
Stephen Hooks has indeed surrendered his majority shareholding to Mangrove Equity 5 months ago. Reason, sadly, is pretty simple. No other financing avenues left to APR other than to sell out ownership in order to raise cash to keep the company going.
Most of what’s been already said here is true. Motorsport team was completely disbanded last year after loosing a great deal of money (7 figures…) in the year the R8 was run. The workshop is entirely closed down recently, all the techs have been laid off/left. Court case with Audi of America over the unpaid R8 race-car bills. They’ve just lost the court case against VWR for unpaid bills last week. But overall the financial story is just really bad financial management over a long period of time, visible to all of us on the inside. Think we’d all agree that the engineering and brand marketing has always been APRs strength, but the financial control, business sense and maybe arrogance of the company’s exec team has led to this.
It’s been a long story over 24 months of simultaneously keeping up a public image of more and more expensive cars, motorsport, company jet, building expansion, lavish show presence, extravagent projects and just vanity tbh - yet leaving a trail of unpaid debts with suppliers, laying off staff, cuts to product investment, struggling for cash on a daily basis. All the company’s assets are financed and refinanced, credit cards are maxed, loans taken from every source and 2 years of searching for investment have led APR to have no remaining options to secure the cash to finance the day to day operations. Sadly Hooks had to let the majority of his shares go in exchange for this cash injection.
The Mangrove Equity team have clearly seen an opportunity to ‘grab’ a good brand and good engineering team - but CEO Hooks, plus COO (Hook’s best friend Johnny Petrina) have been relieved of duties, and had all management and budgetary control removed from them effective immediately. It’s the classic corporate raid. Of course Hooks retains his minority shareholding and will remain in some figurehead capacity.
Speculation in the building is now that we will cut back on the non-profitable hardware lines, concentrate on the profitable remaps. And kill dead the extravagent lifestyle that the company has been providing its exec team at the expense of staff and suppliers.
Don’t doubt that APR will probably have a bright future under Mangrove. Just very different and with a sensible business approach.
[/quote]
It is of no surprise that this individual immediately lit the torches and accused another APR employee of posting the information as “jred”.
At the expense of being overly critical. The numbers and lines don’t add up. So technically it looks like they’ve got too many points of reference. Essentially you can just use the gaps as reference but typically that’d not be how most boost gauges work.
So it looks like APR superchargers will be back up on the site tomorrow. APR will claim that it was a long patent issue that needed to be resolved. Frankly I think it’s just that Magnuson has a much better legal team.
For those who don’t know, Magnuson was also bought out by private equity years ago and the CEO’s husband is a successful lawyer (you can google their names if you’re really curious).
Needless to say, one of my insiders indicated that APR made moves to back out of the SC program when the patent issue popped up (it was quickly squashed by Magnuson since the claimant didn’t have legal standing). Magnuson and their legal team went down to APR ~30 days ago from 12/3-4/2014 and it seems as if they were unwilling to allow APR to back out of the prior agreement. APR indicated that they will be putting back the SCs on their site tomorrow.
At the same time as this challenge from Magnuson over the future of the SC kits, APR was also facing another legal issue from another company over pirated accounting software which was being used on their network. Faced with two battles, it appears that APR has opted to settle for the path of least resistance with both companies.
That being said, it’s difficult to say that the SC program coming back to market is a good thing. Looking at the relatively few kits out there without issues (& without owners covering up issues), plus the fact that GRD’s RS4 still doesn’t appear to be back at their shop, as well as the ecodetuning R8 requiring a new engine purchase, are these kits really ready for consumer use?
What about future support now that APR has sold almost all their vehicles?
Not good I say…
This is all information which I held off on posting when it came to light one month ago in hopes that APR would reform over the holiday season. Nope, they’re still the same company. The latest issue is that I paid for a set of VWR mounts to be installed on my A3 while it was out there. They installed them, took them off and said that they were no good and offered me a replacement alternative. Neither the original VWR mounts, the replacement 034 mounts or the money I initially paid was delivered back to me. I am not the only person they did this to either. More on this later.
Dave
“This is all information which I held off on posting when it came to light one month ago in hopes that APR would reform over the holiday season. Nope, they’re still the same company.”
Dave
I enjoyed reading reading your post until you said the above, you sound like Richie Cunningham from happy days, “golly gee I really hoped they would change” wtf no you didn’t, in fact you knew they wouldn’t, we all new they wouldn’t. keep posting your factual posts and don’t try and make yourself out to be some one who cares, you have proven in the past you will destroy someone over the internet just for fun, your a bully not a caring person.
That’s funny coming from you Steve…
Probably should have posted some of this last week but it looks as if some employees have quit.
One calibrator quit to take up a position with Honda Performance.
One sales guy quit to go back to police work.
Also, they’ve sold their remaining big rig trailer/tent setup so it’ll be pretty interesting to see APR presence at shows this year.
http://i.imgur.com/JaR1Psi.jpg
Dave
There goes H20.
APR . . . going, going . . . .
:-\
Not quite gone… they appeared in C&D as an rs7 road test. Wonder if the C&D editors saw this thread looool
http://m.caranddriver.com/reviews/apr-audi-rs7-stage-1-test-review
[quote=""]
[quote=""]
Trap speeds were good. Et wasn’t. Still rapes the super tesla
[quote=“MDUBZ,post:594,topic:6052”]
[quote=""]
Another instance of APR over promising and under-delivering . . . . :-[
[quote=“MDUBZ,post:594,topic:6052”]
Hasn’t this software been out for over a year? Another revision required? lol.
Aka jacked boost request up because it kept running 11.5
paging disappointedcustomer…
http://i.imgur.com/NazilqO.jpg
FWIW, this is a photograph that Arin said could get him fired . . . which is why it wasn’t released and why those objects have been blurred out.
why is Phil Kessell holding a cock?