Tune makes a huge difference (with mods)

[filtercoffee]

When I acquired my Z4M from fellow forum member sandwood, he had reverted his intake, exhaust, and tune back to stock. He threw in his Epic tune (ECI + Mod file) with the sale, which is a 93 octane race tune custom to his previous mods, in case I found it useful in the future.

I ended up redoing most of sandwood's exhaust/intake mods: afe intake, catless headers from status gruppe, supersprint powerloop mufflers. so I got to use the included tune after all. the powertrain mods of his that I did not replicate are the SS section 1 and X-pipe. mine are still stock. so it's a very similar set-up but not quite.

A few observations:

1. when I installed the sgt headers and the powerloops with the stock tune, it droned at 2k rpm (1.8k rpm to be exact). when I flashed the epic tune, the drone was *greatly* reduced and the exhaust noise is just better. Less bassy where it was overly bassy with the stock tune. The annoying resonance at 1.8k rpm is nearly completely gone. It's remarkable how much of a difference the tune makes here.

2. with all the mods (afe intake + headers + muffler) and stock tune, I had low torque at low RPMs and then it would spike around 4k rpm. When I flashed the epic tune, the low and mid RPM torque increased substantially, and I felt the overall torque curve to be MUCH smoother. the car is eager to pull at all RPMs, whereas with the stock tune and mods, it was sluggish till about 3k, and then took off rapidly at 4k (not very linear, difficult to control)

The point of this post is that the tune makes a world of a difference when you have bolt-on intake and exhaust mods, in case you didn't already know. it was a surprise to me how much of a difference it makes.

context: I reverted to the stock tune for a while, went back to the epic tune yesterday and I'm hooked. Night and day difference.