Part 2: Initial drive, initial tunes:
I have ALWAYS considered the Tune the MOST important part of seriously making power and modifying your car. It will play a HUGE part in wether you blow it in pieces, have a nice drive and wether all the money spent will actually produce what it should.
Having said that, I RUSHED Paul @ AVO to get me a kit in order to have Visconti tune it ASAP. Initially Paul was kind enough to try and send me some tunes to get me running even though he did not have the calibration for the SIR 500cc Injectors. As far as JV I had already contacted him and wanted to run his tune on my car. I knew from the start I was going to have to wait a bit but was fine with it.
I have some videos on
My YOUTUBE CHANNEL showing initial startup and runs.
The first 3-4 logs where wasted because of ongoing issues with the Fuel Pump. John started e-tuning my car with mixed results. Sometimes I got a file that felt good, but popped an CEL for Rich (some other times for Lean). Not a big deal or deal breaker, but worried me a bit considering how high in my priorities list is having a PROPER TUNE.
I cannot say I had much problems getting in contact with John. He usually answered the phone extremely quick and was willing to help with whatever I requested quickly.
As time passed and I continued doing logs for John to tweak my file in anticipation for a final Dyno Day, I grew impatient. I kept receiving logs with little to no improvement. Sometimes the logs came out worse than before and worse the before last. The car hesitated to go, logs showed a good amount of knock values, AFR was pig rich. Again, all of this was done with the hope of a Dyno Day to finalize a safe, PROPER Tune.
In total, I flashed 16 E-tune files before getting on a Dyno.
Here are the last four E-tunes Logs Knock Correction values:
I contacted John letting him know that I needed this car dyno tuned already, that it had been 2 and a half months of playing Russian Roulette with the most important part of the modification process. The response I got was a vague approximate date that was never met, even though I waited almost double the timeframe given before moving on.
The Last Straw:
The last straw happened when I was cruising one day, heard something strange, turned off radio and A/C just to notice that my car was LOUDLY knocking at cruising speeds.
I literally feared damaging my engine with these tunes, I stopped using the car. If it weren't for the fact that I DONT Daily Drive my car, I would have lost it... That day I had it. I realized how stupid it was for me to keep waiting.