in the northeast where i am i havent found anyone that can do the tuning i want i just want a clean tune for 450 hp thats it i have all the applicable hardware required for the tune so i dont see the issue besdies theyre just not around here and was told by many tuners that do do that level want to be in the car with the car when they tune it and i dont have the time to drive 500 miles and spend 3 days tuning my car.
To each his own, but I often wonder what makes anyone pick a target like "450 HP" and why they feel they need it.
If you are building a car for specific track use, like drag racing or speed runs, have at it. But be aware that you are making a track-optimized car, not a fast street car.
It's hard to see what one would do with 450 HP, or 707 HP for that matter, on the street. I guess you could give it the gas on the freeway and go shooting up to the car ahead of you, which might take all of five seconds, and then get on the brakes. That can make noise that's awesome to some folks, but the same can be accomplished by straight-piping an Infinity G37, which seems like a bit of a thing around here.
I have a hard time seeing a use case for 450 HP in a front-wheel drive car. (Nor 707 HP in a RWD: the only thing saving your butt is the traction control.)
But like I said, each to his own.
Huge difference in someone wanting to up the power by 20% with just a bigger downpipe, where most competent mail order tunes will be fine, and going for 50% or in your case 500hp.
The only approach that will safely get you running to full potential at 500hp is live tuning, best done not on the road but on a dyno. Equiped with lots of possible replacement spares, travel a long ways for a live session is time and money well spent.
For moderate tuning (up to 350hp) there is a world of difference between the handful of pros and everyone else. Many years ago I went to a T5 Maptun stg3 ECU. They have tuned many Saabs well past 500hp and and Fredrick really understands the issues and trade-offs involved, and is a great guy as well. There were many, many differences between what I got mail order and the tuners not creating their own maps on a dyno - most everyone else, such as say Nobtune.
This plus a thousand percent. Saab's default tuning on a 2.3T was 260 HP in North America, and factory-approved tunes into the low 300s in Europe (Mimmi would know).
450 HP is 50% more than the factory's top output. It's also almost 200 HP per litre.
Horsepower is the product of torque x RPM. The only way to make a lot more horsepower is either:
- Improve the engine's breathing and strengthen the rotating assembly, so the engine can make the same amount of torque but at higher engine speeds. If an engine peaks out at 200 HP @ 5250 RPM, we know (due to the mathematics) that it's putting out 200 ft-lbs at that RPM. Modify the engine to make 200 ft-lbs up at 7000 RPM, the engine will then make 267 HP at 7000 RPM--while possibly still making the same 200 HP at 5250.
- Increase the torque within the engine's present working RPM range. So if you increased torque at 5250 RPM to 300 ft-lbs, you would get 300 HP.
Generally, with a small four cylinder turbo engine, the approach is #2. Increase boost, improve breathing on the exhaust (downpipe), make sure it's fuelled, and--voilà?
One question is how much strength the engine has to withstand such increase in forces. The other question is if the tune avoids engine damaging events like detonation.
It's easy on the Internet (or at a bar, or at Cars and Coffee) to throw around numbers. It can be harder in real life.
Assuming you have been going to the gym reasonably regularly, you probably do various exercises in sets of X reps.
So if you regularly do 10 reps at 100 lbs, how easy would it be to go in one day and jump to 12 reps at 120 lbs? 15 reps at 150 lbs? We know that pretty generic low-risk tunes can easily produce the 12 reps at 120 lbs. But there is a limit, and the limit can hit hard and cause damage.
