Question to guys with a tune

B8 S4
#61

Sorry, looks like I was misunderstood.
I could care less about fuel savings. I drive for pleasure. Burning fuel is my joy.
I put in 93 when available right now anyway. I do not care at all.
What I meant was availability of 93 gas when on a road trip. It is possible to be caught out and your only option to fill is 91. If I cared about fuel economy, I would never have owned a mustang XD Nor would i bother with driving this thing. Hahaha. My avg economy is something like 13L/100 on this car.

Saki - I agree with you on the drive by cable feel. The sad thing is even if response is improved to feel like a cable, we aren’t getting engine braking like on a cable throttle. When you let off the gas, the butterfly doesn’t shut immediately on these things. It gradually closes for some EPA bullshit. So you aren’t getting the same engine braking effect as you would on a nice older car. Man I miss that.

#62

It’s a pretty simple trade off of heat management. If your 1/4 mile tune is optimized for 30 minutes on a road course, it’s leaving something on the table. If you take the hottest 1/4 mile tune and run it on a road course, you’ll heat soak the engine and it will pull you back to near stock horsepower (> 350 WHP down to < 300 WHP). You can’t have it both ways.

You also fundamentally misunderstand the schooling and practice aspect of HPDE events. I have 60 events under my belt and I just started recording GPS lap times. I’m still about 7 seconds off from the lap Randy Pobst would put down driving my car, and I’m one of the fastest guys at these weekend events. So while you’re practicing, gunning every 1/10th mile straightaway just wastes gas and brake pads/rotors. I like wasting money so I do it, but most people go partial throttle and focus on the execution of the next turn. The whole sport is practicing corner entry, apex and exit. The straights are just a chance for you to catch a breath and reset your focus for the turns ahead.

@saki Relax with asserting my first 1/4 mile pull babying the stock clutch 3 years ago is representative of REVO Stage 1. It’s clearly not a record, and also it doesn’t even matter. It makes 365whp and weighs 3750 pounds with me in it. Put that in your calculator.

#63

And folks hot lap their car on the 1/4mile. Especially when there’s very few cars at the strip (unlike the zoo we have here since there’s only one drag strip in the area).

And I don’t think there is any ‘tune’ designed for one way or the other. There is no ‘drag strip’ tune just like there is no ‘road course’ tune. Nor are any of the off the shelf tunes optimized for one or the other.

I drive my car hard on the road course. I’m always ‘on’ even on the straights (otherwise, I ‘fall asleep’ and start losing focus). When I pass by a miata or a BRZ on a high horsepower track, I certainly don’t think they’re going partial throttle. Now if I pass a 458 or a R8 V10, then perhaps (but it’s also confidence in your car vs the risk folks are willing to take). That said, I’ve also been overtaken by spec miatas with SCCA national club racers behind the wheel (lol I certainly wasn’t ‘asleep’). When I see an exotic or a highly modified track car, I almost put my foot through the firewall keeping the throttle planted as much as I can as early as I can. But, more often than not, most gains are made under braking (rather than during acceleration). Go deep! :smiley:

(also, how do you figure what time Randy Pobst would get driving your car?)

#64

You can reference the times for the RS5, M3, etc. and get within a second. Something like a 1:41 at Laguna where I’m more like 1:46.

#65

Kinda related, but I always think it’d be cool to get a pro race driver to take my car out for a hot lap. That way, I can tell how far ‘off’ I am. ;D

I have some buddies who are pro instructors/coaches (and also racers) at the local and national level who I should really call up sometime.

#66

Gotta factor in Cup 2 tires, suspension which I why I took a few seconds off.

This is also relevant to our discussion. I count 5 major pulls every 100 seconds. No back-to-back drag strip runs are that fast.

http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2014/02/2014-Audi-RS-5-vs-2014-Mercedes-Benz-C63-AMG-507-Edition-lap-times.jpg?interpolation=lanczos-none&fit=around|660%3A*

#67

West I think you’re making excuses to justify your purchase

REVO doesn’t give a flying fuck about lap days. They tune for acceleration and dyno numbers. Acceleration and dyno numbers is what sells tunes. If your tune works at the track, what makes you think APR or GIAC wouldn’t? Keep in mind you’ll need to understand the effect of certain parameters…as well as understanding who has changed what parameters.

Also, REVO’s original tune for these cars was all about running absurd ignition timing, and their race tune was so bad it actually made cars slower because they pushed the timing too far. You found this out the hard way when you acceleration tested it.

So stop with the backwards testing of your purchase argument. It doesn’t work. I don’t think you understand what the tuners are actually doing with the APR/GIAC/REVO tunes. At all.

#68

I’m going to go test drive a C63S today or Friday. Is that a car that “works” in your book? I want to run all purchases by you so I can have perfect karma.

#69

I’m not sure I follow.

Revo had issues on original tunes with it being overly aggressive and this caused issues with lots of people. Those who had the tune and others aware of this by seeing logs.

I never mentioned anything about the flash delivery system so I don’t know how that’s related

I don’t know how my summary of why people have negative opinions about revo got twisted into me making a statement.

#70

not specifically defending REVO (or my decision to use their tune) but Sky switched to Revo from APR because that didn’t work for him either- I know APR V1 had issues but I think Sky’s issues had a lot to do with user error.

#71

Because westwest…

#72

Lol lol lol. Now it’s starting to make sense.

I was like I don’t see how I’m making a statement. I thought I was fair in the description issues for both APR and revo

Not to start trouble but to make myself more aware. Prime time am I right that you have had several updates to your tune from APR in testing over the years. If so have you experienced a 30% failure and if not you is this a thing with others… I’m in the dark on this ome

#73

The truth is there is no wrong answer. It’s like Fiji or SmartWater. Both are better than tap water. Early bottles of Fiji didn’t cause kidney stones. Yes, SmartWater’s parent company is responsible for most of the obesity in Alabama. There may have been a leveraged buyout fund involved and Arin got downsized when they streamlined operations to sell the bottling plant.

Casting doubt on Revo makes this forum exhausting. It’s not even a thing in 2015. It might be relevant again when someone tries the first beta B9 3.0TT tune. Then again, there’s no way of knowing which tune will kill you:

http://joeposnanski.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade-billboard-holy-grail.jpg

#74

[quote=“justincredible,post:72,topic:8064”]
Yes, my ecu was bench flashed 7 or 8 times and port flashed 10-15 times(at home but have actual counts on a spreadsheet at the office) between the ecu and/or tcu with zero failures… Battery ran low one time so had to hookup a charger but everything finished fine… West just makes random shit up, lives in bizzaro world or gives that appearance on the forums…

#75

Oh god I didn’t take my medicine today you’re right. I wasn’t at 034’s Dyno Day in July 2014. They weren’t doing APR flashes. And they didn’t put this white S4 up for a bench flash, dyno it twice, and it didn’t show 280 WHP both times. I just dreamed all of that stuff up.

Additionally, my REVO tune doesn’t pull on the RS5, pull on the V8 R8, obliterate every RS4 ever made, and keep a healthy following distance on the R8 V10’s I go to the track with 8 days a year.

http://i63.tinypic.com/15rmxxx.jpg

#76

My non cup tires and stock suspension stage II+ B8 S4 could not keep up with a R8 V10 with a proficient driver behind it - it wasn’t even a challenge - even in a straight line when we had roughly the same exit speed (we caught up on traffic and both passed - if anything, he was handicapped because he had to wait for the let by zone where I came out of the corner and caught up to a slower car in the let by zone still going WOT).

Same with my RS5. I’ve overtaken R8 V10s (and 458 Italia), but that’s driver proficiency, not so much car (again, I was also passed by a spec miata - and also the owner of HOD who disappeared in two corners at Laguna Seca in his Mustang). I have no illusions, behind a capable driver, I would have no chance on an open track against the first gen R8 V10. Stickier tires or otherwise.

My buddy who had a 430 Scuderia (and is a proficient driver) was easily 6-7 seconds a lap faster than I was on the same track in my current car (at my fastest lap). And he’s even faster in his brand new Huracan.

#77

You’re ignorant. It’s 2 seconds faster. Here’s Pobst driving an R8 V10 Plus at a 1:39 lap. That’s the best freaking one by like $40,000. The cheaper ones aren’t that fast. Especially if they need a carbon cleaning or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1uorwaGn9A

#78

lol I’m ignorant. ok, then. ;D

#79

The 458 is in an entirely different league. 1:36 lap. 3 seconds doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s logarithmically more expensive to extract each extra second. The Viper ACR just did 1:28 which is completely bonkers, and as fast as a 991 GT3 Cup car (the $300,000 factory racecar version). It set a production car record at basically every track in the world.

The matter of my family sedan putting the heat on Audi’s best car shouldn’t be reality, but it is. 2 seconds is 15 car lengths. Make 1 mistake and that’s gone.

My main point is the R8 chassis isn’t shit. Shifting the weight from 55% over the nose to 55% over the rear wheels doesn’t do anything. Option an R8 and a B8 equally and you get the same lap time. Carbon brakes will get me that much closer.

458 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMRmLDZXRRI

#80

You know what the problem with the R8 is? The stock alignment.
Change that up and it’s a whole different ball game. It’s in another league than the B8.
Let’s not have any illusions about that.

Audi stock alignment sucks for all of their cars. Doesn’t matter which car. They all drive like ass.
Fix that and watch the lap times tumble!

BTW i cant find a decent 1/4 time for a stock 6spd b8.5. Should it be in the low/mid 13s?
Motortrend did something like 13 flat, but that was dsg. Looks like C&D did 13.3 or something?