Looks like a very very nice time last night from one of our Canadian friends… I’m very encouraged given he has a 2010, and says he has LC working and I’d assume all the shifts are perfect given his et. 60 isn’t stellar not bad by any means but not stellar… This was done on 91 and meth on 100 tune which is very impressive… Good stuff… I shot him a PM so we’ll see what he says…
That’s Matt? Probably the guy I was talking to on YouTube. He was running 11.8 in August so I figured he’d do something special.
Yeah, that’s him… He says his LC is working as he pm’d me back but he’s only launching at 3/4 throttle? To me that explains the good but not great 60’s he is getting AMAX shifting which helps a ton. I’m hoping he has a gopro I asked and told him to join over here… I also mentioned how you guys may all meet up at the track… It’s a great time really, he did have a great DA of -300ish according to dragtimes…
wtf DA was -300 here last night? That’s insane. I was at the golf course (fishing lol) and it didn’t seem too cool.
11.6 @ 118-119 makes sense for his mods and his DA. He has a friend with an EPL tuned S4 too I think (according to his youtube videos). Would be interesting to see what that car is running.
Looks like the guys are getting their stage III cars back… Dude on facepage posted about it and did a vid, honestly and everyone knows I want this kit to work, it doesn’t seem as fast as the top stage II cars. He did a dig launch to 120 and it took longer than 11.5 seconds to get to 120 so… Not exactly scientific but until we see some pulls against a stage II car or dragstrip data we won’t know… Paging Richi and Pete… lol
Without much better cooling, and then tuning to support that, I don’t see how it gets there. Those types of changes don’t seem fully possible within a few weeks, but I don’t know. I think both changes are an absolute must just based on what we saw the first go round.
One other thing to consider is we haven’t seen stage 3 run on race gas which you have to figure would help quite a bit with some of the issues the kit is having. All the sub-12 second times we see with stage 2 are run with race gas, so you at least have to consider that if you want to hold it to that standard.
the tune can change in a couple of hrs if you know what you’re doing and what you’re looking for. I watched CountVohn do that on the APR 1320 RS4 SC kit. The car was running 12.7-12.8 @ 108. CV wrote a new file and took the car to the strip. Made a couple of passes and made a couple more tweaks. Then ran 12.0-12.1 @ 116-117.
Sometimes the tuning is just bad. This is APR after all, so we know they’ve had a tendency to rush products out and fix them later.
RS4 1320 kit
RS4 1740 kit
B8 stage 1 tune
B8 stage 2 tune
B8 TCU
B8 1740 kit
seeing a trend? All of these were horrible when launched and needed a bunch of customers complaining about them to get APR to fix them.
As I opened, I said you can fix it in a couple of hours if you know what you’re doing. Doesn’t look like APR does.
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and from what KeithNOT@APR says, it’s hard to find a guy like CV. I’ve said this before, but it’s pretty funny to watch a company like APR’s TEAM of calibrators struggle to make power or actual acceleration. Then along comes a guy who can make one of their products successful in a few hours.
It would be funny to see them reach out again in a few weeks when they realize they just can’t figure it out and customers are getting pissed.
I mentioned this previously in the part of the thread that got moved. Right now I think it has to be looked at as an alternative for someone that wants to get close to the upper echelon of stage 2 levels, but doesn’t want to do all the mods it takes to get there. One fairly simple mod as opposed to several smaller ones. Maybe not the most cost effective way to do it when you consider what you get with just the stage 2 pulley/tune, but some people don’t care much about cost effectiveness…
I think you’ll see it play out into several different schools of thought in terms of modifications and results:
- Basic stage 2. Just the pulley/tune. This will be the best bang for the buck for most people. Maybe 425-450 hp, and capable of running low 12’s. All in for something in the $2-5k range depending on what you have done (most people that do stage 2, will have an exhaust and intake, and maybe a clutch upgrade/DSG tune).
- Advanced stage 2. All of the above, but also other supporting mods. That could be test pipes, LW wheels/rotors, oversized crank pulley, W/M, E85, clutch/DSG tune, whatever. This will bump the car up to that 11.5 (to upper 11’s) range, and maybe 500 hp. At this point, you are probably looking at something in the $5-10k range, and easily more if you get too crazy with it.
- Basic stage 3. Basic bolt on stage 3 kit here. Capable of something like mid to upper 11’s. Maybe close to 500 hp again, and it will set you back $10-12k (I still think the kit needs full cooling, and that pushes it closer to $12k). Again, most people will have an exhaust, so tack on another $2k or so. So, results similar to the advanced stage 2 level, just a different and slightly more expensive way to get there.
- Advanced stage 3. This will be something like the kit APR is talking about. Smaller pulley, a lot more cooling, and different tuning. It probably takes something like W/M, and/or race gas to get to this level. You’re talking mid-to-low 11’s, and probably $15k+ to get there.
I don’t want to get too far sidetracked from the discussion, so I’ll keep my response in regards to the B8 S4. The tuning for the B8 S4 stage 3 kit didn’t necessarily look bad. It looked like it was tuned to cover for the hardware deficiencies of the system (cooling and efficiency). Until the cooling is addressed, the tuning isn’t going to make much of a difference no matter who does it.
At least to this point, every first release of a tune that has come out for the B8 S4 had some issue regardless of the vendor/tuner. That’s not uncommon at all, and at least to this point, the major tuners have cleaned up any issues, and the results seem to indicate they have done a decent job.
you’ve seen some stage 3 results? I haven’t. So I’m not sure how you’re comparing stage anything with stage 3. The only ‘results’ I’ve seen are stage 2 cars kicking the shit out of stage 3 cars.
As for the ‘costs’ argument, there’s 3 wavess of modding
power mods
tune/pulley/overdrive pulley/intake
Everything else is a waste of time. Headers? Waste. Meth? Meh. test pipes? Waste. catback? Waste.
So power wise, tune/pulley/intake = $2000 and you’ve got 90% of the acceleration gains you’re going to get. If you bought a B8.5 DSG you need a TCU tune as well. That’s 25% of the cars out there though, so I wouldn’t add that in to all of the 8K S4s.
So $2000 for power mods that move the needle. Want to go stage 2+? $500 for JHM OD Crank pulley. Now you’re at $2500 and you’re WAY into the 11s.
Next? LW parts
wheels, rotors
Your rotors are going to be done anyway sooner or later. So you can pay $400 for OEM or $1100 for JHM LW. Call that a $700 ‘mod’.
Your wheels…the peelers are insanely heavy. The stock 18s are 5 lbs lighter. Hard to count lw wheels as being expensive mods when they’re free with the car (the 18s). You can get great looking VMR 710 or 708 for $1000. They’re 25 lbs each.
The final stage of mods is preserving power.
Improved cooling system. Certainly helps but not entirely necessary. Let’s pretend it is. That’s $2,000
So you can have tune/pulley/intake/lw fr rotors/cooling for about $5,000.
You can have tune/pulley/intake/lw fr rotors/Overdrive pulley for about $5,500
Or you can go stage 3 for $12,000. This is not even close.
We’ve debated the cost portion to death in the part that got moved, so there’s no need to rehash here. We’ve said what we had to say, it’s there for others to take it or leave it.
The only point I’ll make, which is relatively inconsequential, is the factory 18’s aren’t close to being LW wheels. They weigh 27 lbs. With the OEM tires, they are something like 53-54 lbs. They are 4-5 lbs. lighter than the factory peelers, but by no means light by most standards. I think most people would agree that when you are talking LW wheels/tires, you are looking for something in the sub-45 lb. range.
Auditude had them and said they were lighter than 27lbs I believe, but even then…they are LW wheels compared to the peelers which are the ‘standard’ people compare wheel weights to.
Further, most guys end up with 19x9.5 wheels that weigh 25-26 lbs. BBS CHR are around there and are $3000. Hell, HRE P40s are 24 lbs each and are $5,000 a set. If you want, you can make an extreme argument to jack up the cost, but let’s instead look at the facts
stock 18" wheels are far lighter than the peelers (16-20 lbs of rotating mass reduced is HUGE…same as front+rear rotors+LWCP)
you can find great looking LW wheels for $1000
Even if you want to focus on this (for some reason) it’s $1000 added to the $5000 or $5500. Still miles from stage 3, and still miles faster.
Your entire argument about the cost centres on buying expensive wheels…buying an expensive catback and test pipes that do basically nothing…buying a DSG tune that does nothing on 2010-2012 DSG cars, and does not apply to 2010-2016 MT6 cars. Strip that out and you’re where I am…on the mods that count.
We can all get headers and HREs and Milltek catback and Brembos and custom meth kit. None of that does anything other than jacking up the price to make stage 3 look a better deal. Those mods are $13,000…and none of them are necessary. You can get $1000 LW wheels (or free if 18" stockers like auditude)…you can get $1100 JHM rotors…and you’re at $2200 and are just as fast as the guy who spent $13,000. So does it make sense to add those in? Nope.
I gave what I think is a reasonable range of what B8 S4 owners spend to modify their cars. That’s it. If you want to argue or debate every last detail, go for it. I said what I had to say, and like I said earlier, the people that read this can draw their own conclusions.
Trying to set up for Thursday Ron.
Nice! get logs… ;D
shooting for next week. cant do Thursday. the car feels stronger but we will see how strong it actually is when i get to mexico.
Any word on what they changed?
They did something with the seals for the intercoolers, claim that air was just going around them and not through causing IAT spikes in addition to the air pockets in the cooling
Good stuff and thanks for sharing Richi… Hope it works out…