ongoing experience with fa20club tune
 

I posted a few weeks ago some early impressions, I figured that there must be a number of noobs like me who would like to get a first hand experience with the stage 1, 1.5 tuning from fa20club.

First of all, I am not a tuning expert, I do have a long background in many aspects of software engineering and was curious to see what a reprogramming of the ECU would be able to do. I started with a little bit of "snake oil fear" but sent my $$ for the base stage 1 + cable kit.

I received my kit after about 5 days and found it pretty easy to use initially. I do have an old laptop use just for the reflashing fun and got the software going and installed in about 30 minutes.

I received an initial tune from fa20club on the same day and found the flashing process to be pretty straightforward. The whole licence key stuff can be a bit tricky, but I got the car going with the initial tune and took it for a quick drive.

The first 5 minutes of driving where, as expected, unresponsive since the engine is creating it's calibration parameters, but after that initial learning, the car was obviously a much more aggressive machine, even the engine noise was pretty different from the stock.
The biggest difference was how responsive the car got.

I captured a few initial log (easy to do, harder to find a long clear road) and went thru the process of sending my logs to fa20 and receiving an updated tune after a few hours.

This is one of the impressive aspects of fa20club, how much they seem to nearly always have someone ready to look at your tunes or get you out of a corner (more on this later).

I went thru 8 iterations of log -> tune and at this point do have a really fun car to drive. The rev limiter is up to 8000 rpm and I had a chance to compare the performance with stock in two ways:

Using torque and an ODB2 logger, I did a computation of the wheel horsepower before/after, this number needs to be seen as relative to one another, not an absolute value. I went from 162 hp at the wheels to 177 hp.
The zero to 60 with a modest launch at 3000 rpm went from 7.4 to 6.5 ! Once again, take this number with a grain of salt, but the difference is striking.

On the problem side, I got myself in a corner twice:

First time was the laptop going in sleep mode during reflash... you do end up with a car which will not start at all and unable to try the flash again. the reason for this is that the licence key is transfered from the dongle to the ECU itself. if you end up with a partial flash, your licence key is lost and you at stuck.
I e-mailed to fa20club (a friday at 6 pm PST) and got a new key in 30 minutes and got back and running. that is service !

The second time, I hit a bug(?) in the ecutek software which caused the flash to fail at start, same situation and once again fa20club saved me in 1 hour !

Since then, it does look like ecutek fixed this bug and i did not see it back yet.

Next step now is to get racerom in my ECU and maybe start to play with 100 octane mode, but...

if you do have an brz, you are missing a LOT of the car by not using a tune. the difference is really something.

Everything I read about this tune makes me want to get it more and more.

I hope it really is as easy to do as you guys say!

I have this tune on a stock car and I concur with these impressions, so far. It will be drinking corn juice later this week. More impressions to follow. Dyno hopefully in a week or two (getting GFB pulleys and lightweight battery put in). I'm just about ready to pull the trigger on a turbo kit and will look forward to E85 on that.

Although I'm a V8 guy through and through, these little 2 liters are lots of fun!

Wow, these guys really seem to go above and beyond. Usually it's just a canned tune and kthxbai! Sounds like they take the time to make sure your car runs right.

Nice review. Luckily I'm only a 3-4 hour drive from them, I'll just head down there and have him tune it on the dyno.

Exactly, he has worked with me for a few months now and every time it gets better.

I would definitely, you won't regret it.

I would have already, but other items are more important (suspension and brakes :) )

Working on that myself now...

looking forward to the flex fuel kit from Tony.....

Ditto

Thats it! I am ordering the Stage 2 Tune because I will have my aFe Intake. With the Intake, light weight pulley, and this tune, I hope this really gives this car an extra kick. FA20 Club will earn my business over john. I rather deal with a company than just 1 person. This is not a knock on John or his ability at all. Please people do not take my comments in the wrong way.

FA20 is one tuner also, Toni does an amazing job i flashed a new file tonight and can't get over the smoothness of it already. You will be pleased, i know i am.

Good to know. FA20Club does have a shop correct?