Interesting RS4 Modification experiment - Does $3,000 = $11,600?

So after we saw the video a week or two ago of the AMD supercharger kit in ‘low pressure’ or stage ‘0.9’ form racing a basically stockish B7 RS4, I thought the result looked kind of…uninspiring.

It was nice to see that the AMD car was faster…but damn, the owner just dropped $12,000 in mods lol. It had better be!

I also started wondering if this was the M90 supercharger kits happening all over again. If you’ll recall, the B6/7 S4 world saw guys with $10,000 VF or PES supercharger kits running 1/4 mile times in the high 12s, which is what guys with JHM tune and full intake/exhaust mods were running…for $3,000 in mods. That was a disaster for PES and VF.

The next chapter was PES and VF flogging the SAME KITS for the RS4 guys…even though Eaton and Magnusson representatives came on the forums and showed compressor maps and data that show the RS4 flows nearly the same CFM as an M90. The result there was we had guys with $12,000-15,000 RS4 supercharger kits (not sure why they were more expensive lol) running SLOWER than RS4s with tunes and exhaust.

Well along came AMD to save the day with their TVS1900 supercharger. Big monster blower built for V8 cars, so it should be perfect right?

Let’s see…since they haven’t shared any data on the kit’s progress or performance, let’s see what happens when you race an AMD RS4 vs. a sort of stock Rs4.

Camera car: stock other than Milltek fullback (about $3,000). As users of this site know, http://audirevolution.net/forum/index.php?topic=56.0 Milltek can’t design a 4.2 exhaust for performance to save their life, so the ‘high flow cats’ and stock diameter catback are likely adding little to nothing over stock.
+1 passenger for a weight penalty

vs.

2008 RS4 with AMD supercharger ($10,000), EPL tune ($1,000), AMD catless downpipes ($600?) = $11,600 modlist

They botched the second pull with a misshift in the SC car, so let’s watch the first pull…which appears to be a roll from around 40-50 MPH to about 110 MPH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXo34TGe2bk

Pretty nice result for the supercharged car, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately what looks like a convincing win (3 car lengths in this short pull) is really not that fantastic considering the modlist. How do we know this?

Because here is what it looks like when you race a stock RS4 vs. a PES M90 supercharged RS4 (you know…the mid 12s @ 111 PES kit)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VkKOZ95aXo

As you can see, it’s a pretty similar result. That’s not a good thing.

Want to see something even more incredible? How about if we race a stock RS4…the fastest stock RS4 ever to post a 1/4 mile time in fact (12.75 @ 108.3)…vs. a car with about $3,000 in JHM bolt ons?

Stock RS4 (Camera car) + 180 lb passenger
94 octane PetroCanada (1/4 tank)

vs

JHM tuned RS4 no passenger ($650 tune)
JHM LWFW/stage4 clutch ($1600)
JHM LW crank pulley ($350)
JHM intake spacers ($200)
Piggies just precats gutted, DIY ($free, DIY)
ECS hpipe resonator delete ($200)
$3,000 in mods

Infact…let’s see the AMD SC video side by side with the stock vs. JHM bolt ons video


http://audirevolution.net/uploads/player_thumbs/2Vqv5fT5noGRkEXKgLoA.jpg
Watch “AMD RS4 Supercharger JHM RS4 Tune/Piggies” on AudiRevolution.net

Before anyone cries, let’s get a few things out of the way

  1. Perhaps my car had more weight in it than the car in the vs. AMD video…I had a 180 lbs passenger, and who knows what the passenger in the other video weighed. Maybe they were a female Russian gymnast.

  2. My car has never been carbon cleaned. So some will point to that and say that’s it…the stock car in the JHM video is a mid 13s car so it’s a useless comparison. But if you were paying attention, you would have noticed that my RS4 is actually the fastest RS4 ever to hit the dragstrip in stock form as noted above. It went 12.75 @ 108.3 at 35,000 miles…and went 12.83 @ 109.9 @ 42,000 miles…so no dice!. Further, the JHM car was carbon cleaned, but it was a year ago, and as we know carbon doesn’t sit around waiting to return. Finally, the AMD car was carbon cleaned when the kit was installed a few weeks ago I’d imagine…so the delta on carbon is probably IN THE AMD CAR’S FAVOUR

  3. The ‘stockish’ car in the AMD race has milltek high flow cat downpipes (stock diameter lol) and catback (stock diameter lolx2) which may give it an edge. As we’ve seen however, this setup has proven to deliver little, performance wise. The guy who sells you the $3,000 exhaust will give you a nice dyno sheet though we haven’t seen delta in performance.

Great work!! This is good research!!

Thanks. I guess AMD could still be working on their kit to make it better…(although they claim it’s in full production and retail sales are humming along???) . Who knows.

Since a contact from the camaro forums saw the AMD HIGH BOOST version of this kit struggle to get out of the 12s at the dragstrip in fantastic density altitude (well below 0 feet) seeing this LOW BOOST kit perform as it did makes total sense. I’d imagine it’d be a 12.2-12.3 car or thereabouts.

A here’s a pic when we all stopped accelerating

It’s also interesting to note the instant throttle response on the jhm car. Vs the laggy stock and EPL tuned cars.

http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo193/sakimano/Screenshot_2013-04-20-23-54-01_zps0dcd0cb9.png

Wow… I really don’t see a difference. Really is reminding me of my PES experience.

Unless AMD pulls off a serious jump in performance (think TTS), it really isn’t attractive to me. It’s hard to accept a kit that doesn’t perform as good or better than the bench mark TTS. Unfortunately TTS is completely out of the question at the price tag of $19,000.00 USD.

Hopefully JHM outputs performance specs as good or better than TTS, at JHM S4 kit pricing. If the S4 kit is any indication, I believe it will…

I know where MTM fits in the price side of this, but where do they fit in the performance side?

No performance testing was really shared other than a pbox 0-200 (not verified by anyone) on a stripped mtm show car

There is a localish mtm car in Rochester who had his kit installed at horchaus in Montreal (mtm dealer). On their Dyno it made 410 whp.

So basically Apr tvsr1320 type numbers.

Strong work. One day that damn dragstrip will open!

This is an awesome compilation of “visual” performance, nice work Saki.

Interesting stuff. Nice work Saki.

I’d love to see the full JHM car go head to head with the AMD…I would suspect the same results as when ngng went against them in the s4

Wow. Very interesting. Can’t wait to see how all this plays out. Clearly it takes a lot to force feed an rs4 motor to a point where it will start to pick up drastic amounts of power over a bolt on car.

This is one more of the huge disasters that come with amd. Im sure we will see them try to push this supercharger on pwople like they push the tial turbos that have been a big pile of fail. This is daming for the loosing amd kit. On the bright side…yiu can get a cool dyno sheet for this just like you can for the tial tuebos…I almost forgot the guy who posted the video of the amd kit raceing the stock rs4…the amd kit guy had to pull his motor for oil issues

I think the best part was JonathanC’s comment [quote]The Kit was designed to be Tuner agnostic
[/quote]
, which shows that even he doesn’t trust EPL…what a fucking joke.

They also go on to distance themselves from any results that may be brought to light!! Basically saying if people fail, it isn’t the kits fault…it is the driver, tuner, or dyno calibrator…lol

[quote]The results you asked about ( Dyno, Acceleration metrics, and 1/4 mile time ) are strongly related to the calibration and in some, the Driver, other supporting modifications.
[/quote]
I can’t even believe anyone would waste money on this fucking kit with the company selling it acting so shady. The can’t guarantee anything because they know the kit isn’t where it should be, but they are trying to offload it to members behind the scenes with their “deals” and money back guarantee.

This is a joke…I hope we get a bolt-on JHM car to run one of this supercharged cars soon or better yet a JHM supercharged car pulling their infamous 1.0’s front bumper off