Hey, I’d like to find a benchmark for my RS4. It’s my daily driver, fundamentally stock, and I don’t want to beat on it (no 4K clutch dumps on my stock clutch, please), nor travel to and spend on variable dynos (and get into the whole “my dyno run - on a different brand of dyno - is better than yours”).
I’d like some sort of a repeatable benchmark I can use to gauge performance and health of my car, and not judge my manhood by the resulting times. Objective, repeatable, so I can have a civil discussion with myself about the health of my car, and an equally civil and objective discussion with other enthusiasts about the health of our cars.
I’ve used 3k to redline 3rd gear highway pulls previously, in my C4 S6 and B5 S4. This would put me supersonic in my RS4, and likely admit me to the Crossbar Hotel if a REO happened to be spectating.
Is there a common non-dyno, non-¼ mi baseline used by the denizens of this forum? Has anyone gathered data from a variety of drivers?
If you want an idea of how your car is doing so it on a flat road the same way every time you do it and you’ll have a decent gauge of performance.
Turn on the stopwatch in the in dash computer and leave it running
Film your gauge cluster with your phone. You will need good quality so you can pause the video at 3000 and 8000 and read the stopwatch so keep the phone hand anchored to the wheel
Get going full rocket from around 2000 right until you hit 8200 rpm or so
When you hit the top shift briskly to fourth and then coast down. Otherwise if you just push in the clutch you will get the sticky clutch and probably panic if you’re that worried about launching your car from a stop.
Just got a wifi ELM327 dongle and DashCommand on my iPhone, thinking I could get a good 3K-8K 3rd gear run, with more granular timing, plus logging more data.
NOT.
Logs at one second intervals, so I have only the most basic idea of how long it took.
I’ll have to try it with my laptop in the passenger seat, but it’ll have to wait, as we’re getting a bit of snow/slush right now.
start with the easy and dig deeper later if you need to. You can do an acceleration test in vag com if you want. It offers 0-60 and other acceleration tests. Before you do that I would do what sakimano mentioned. Its easy and quick
The real trick is flat road. Too many ppl do it downhill to Make there cars seen faster than they are. Why they lie to themselves I’m not sure but it Def happens.
not that awesome for JHM tune and exhaust. Is it just a catback? Or do you have downpipes modified? Catless? Piggies? You should really consider going to OEM downpipes piggied. Would help a good bit and also would allow the tune to do some more work.
what octane?
37 fahrenheit should yield a better result when tuned, but again if it’s a 91 tune on 91 in california, that isn’t far off. If it’s a 93 tune in Canada with 94 octane Petro Canada fuel, you’re definitely leaving something on the table
For perspective my car when stock would run in the low 8s in great weather, and with full JHM exhaust with high flow cats in great weather it would get to 7.6-7.7 or so.
Now I struggle to get below 8.0, after 2 years of carbon buildup I assume (or misfires or something even though I don’t get misfire CELs). With that being said, my dragstrip times and traps are unchanged from what they were when I was able to put down a 7.6 3k-8k in 2013-2014. So much for carbon killing performance! It definitely shows up in this test…and it definitely shows up on the dyno, however it’s not impacting actual acceleration in real world conditions all that much.
i.e. if you rip from 0-60 mph, your carbon buildup won’t even change the result…and if it does, it’s maybe half a tenth.
If you rip through the first 4 gears from a stop to 110 mph (aka the quarter mile) you also won’t see much of a difference at all.
If however you sit the car down at 2000 RPMs and wallow through a gear right to redline (the test you just did) you will see an impact as you’re spending a ton of time at ultra high RPMs, adn that’s where carbon buildup gets you. 7500-8000 RPMs. Same goes for the dyno. If you didn’t notice, this run is very similar in time to a dyno run.
So as mentioned, you’re not where you should be perfect world, but you’re not far off.
Milltek non-resonated from previous owner, cat-back. Reputed to have JHM tune to go with it, according to the dealer from whom I bought it, not sure of octane of tune. I had a full tank of Mobil Super+, Northeast US winter blend, likely 91 octane.
I’m not sure of your location, but if you can find 93 octane, re-test it.
If you can then get your pre-cats gutted out of the stock downpipes, that will be another bump that would also warrant a retest. I wouldn’t be surprised to see your car on 93 with piggies and JHM tune down in the 7.3-7.4 range from 3k - 8k. That’s about 680 RPM/second across the entire rev range which is excellent (speedo based). If this were a fats time like you may be used to in your B5 S4 (if manual) that’s about 3.4 seconds…but the B5 test is 4200-6500 the meat of the power curve whereas the RS4 is running from 3000-8000 which includes some soft areas. So that 3.4 seconds if an actual 4200-6500 test would be a bit better.
I would also suggest getting a log to make sure you are JHM tuned. It sounds like you are, but a log will show right on the header the ECU name, which will have JHM and the version tune you have. Might be worthy of an udpate on their server.
Great to know about 93 upping my game a bit. I’ve just discovered that the regional convenience store Cumberland Farms sells 93, so looks like I’ll be switching from Mobil Super+ to Cumbies 93.
I’ll look into gutting the pre-cats once it warms up a bit around here.
I’ll fire up VCDS and see if I can see any evidence of a JHM tune .
I’m from the Cape and pretty much exclusively see 93 everywhere. Kind of strange that Mobil sells only 91 in New Bedford.
I have the 93 tune on my S4 but when I go north and only 91 is available there is definitely a noticeable loss. I would assume you’re going to run into the same situation with the RS if you have the 93 tune.
If you’re ever in my neck of the woods and want to do pulls I’ve always been curious how my car stacks up against a stockish RS
7.8s with only a tune seems very good to me. (Milltek hp gains seem to be within the margin of error of a dyno - small if they exist.) When unsure about the road being level do both directions and take the average.
Gutting precats will improve things a lot, could be worth 3 tenths. From my experience adding a tune to a stock exhaust really doesn’t get you much aside from lifting the annoying throttle restriction in the lower gears. Tune and precat delete starts to noticeably free some horsepower. By far the biggest gain from an individual part seems to come from the (full) JHM exhaust - roughly double the performance increase from deleting the precats.
I did many runs in different states of tune over time on the same bit of road. My car in winter stock - 8 secs. Minus precats 7.75s. Then added a JHM tune 7.6s. Full JHM exhaust plus their tune 7.0s (last number extrapolated as a colder run was 6.8 and a warmer one 7.2)
I think the claim that the JHM tune is made with their exhaust in mind is valid, the result is better than the sum of adding the individual parts.
