Hi guys! Been a while since Josh and me started our “adventure” of solving the tune for my Z4M with 288 280 cams. Just as a reminder – after having a solid 334whp (dynojet) with SS V1 headers cat-less, was not being able to improve at all and as the last try before joining and posting here ended up with 285whp with the MK Motorsport tune (tuner for Germany).
Tune is not totally done yet but already it’s obvious it’s working great and gains are there!
Don’t think it took us all 6 months, many times we had periods of not having time to do anything, especially me after I became a father
First two to three months were the most difficult to get rid of the “limits” which obviously occurred every time I press the throttle more than 60%.. (hesitations, hick-ups, low power). My car has the stock box and MAF, which means that all the stock tune features are there – meaning there are many, many safety features, torque limiters etc. This is NOT an Alpha N tune, this is a MAF based tune which remains adaptive. Speaking with Josh various times I learned how complicated the MSS70 is (much, much more than E46 MSS54) and no wonder nobody had interest to figure it all out, especially because of the low numbers of our cars. We also suffered and lost time trying to get the right logging tool – managed to solve that later in a good enough way. All in all, patience paid off. And Josh is so persistent and full of knowledge. I am happy that my case helped Josh to solve all those limiting features of the MSS70. Once Josh got rid of those limits with one test tune I took a drive and felt that there are no hesitations – you can’t imagine what a difference that was and how nice the car felt. And on the dynojet it showed at once – without any adjusting to new cams the car showed +13whp at some spots in the highest rpm range (compared to stock cam best curve). I was sure of that since my usual testing was highway driving in 5th gear to red line LOL!
After that we went on another very conservative dyno (which was the only one available in late hours due to European time differences) to actually do the tuning for power and we got +15hp peak power over the tune that already showed +13whp over the stock cam best curve. I’ll stop there with the numbers since I still didn’t go back to the dynojet to have the exact comparison before/after! – that is going to be the most interesting part! I won’t do it before we finish the tune completely. At the moment we’re in a phase of finalizing the fuel trims (though for the last 1.5 months I simply had no free time to spare and the weather was shitty). During this month we expect to be done and have the comparison.
What Josh and I will report to our community is only 100% truth. There is no interest in showing better gains than they actually are, there is no interest in any marketing here. I’m saying this because what we expect to get on that final before/after comparison is not as wonderful as I was seeing in some M3 E46 posts. Perhaps I was being influenced, but Josh was aware how will it work. Also my “Emtron stand-alone tuner friends” told me that most of those M3 post results were unrealistic. What I can say now is that the peak power gains are there and the area under the curve is fine but do not expect to be like the ones I used to see on some M3 posts. Here I must also add that engine reliability was most important!!! Since, if a tuner chooses to sacrifice reliability a modest amount of extra power can be gained.
And here I must write this: we are so, so lucky to have Josh! The way he approaches each project is as if it is his own car. Imagine how would you fix a lunch for your own kid – that is how Josh treats tuning cars – with utmost care, taking care of every detail and so much knowledge. From my experience I can say for typical tuners there is simply no commercial sense in having such a detailed and careful approach with so much time invested. That’s why I’ll repeat – so, so lucky! I just remember some situations from before where I ask the tuner what is he doing and get zero answers like he is doing some kind of a spaceship design which I won’t understand and then when Josh tells me how that tune looks like and what’s done – you just end up laughing and realize that you were just one order request which needed to be dealt off pretty quickly so they can move on to the next one. After this experience with Josh there is no way I will give my M3 E46 to anyone for tuning! Except Josh! I plan to persuade him to cover the MSS54 platform also!
So, let us wait for the final results
(which will also include 100-200 km/h accel. times vs stock cam times) Then I’ll also write some technical analysis of the results.