Quote:
Originally Posted by Circuit Motorsports
If you're paying a tuner to make you a custom map, and all he's giving you is an hour of his time on the dyno, you need a new tuner 
When we tune a car it gets 4-6 hours of our time. You leave with the best, safest and most solid tune you can buy. If you want to compare a real professional custom tune with an OTS map for safety, you need to make sure you are using the right tuner for comparison. |
What I've seen is professional tuners letting things slip, though most people don't really pick up on it. I'm not talking about you specifically, I don't know that you've said these things. And this is obviously all thrown out the window if you have major, atypical changes, but:
1) Discussing why should get a custom tune:
Having your car custom tuned gets you all these wonderful gains and safety.
2) Discussing why tunes should be considered IP and protected:
The cost for custom tunes is so high because we've spent so much time tweaking our tunes across 8000 cars and we're not going to just give that away.
The two just don't jive. What #2 really tells me is that professional tuners are basically just giving you an OTS tune they've created, and maybe throwing your car on the dyno or driving around the block for validation. It says if you don't have an atypical setup, a custom tune isn't necessary.
I get that there are subtle differences between different headers and intakes and whatever. But I also know how sophisticated our ECUs are. For mild, common mods to our cars, the ECU can more than compensate for the negligible differences.
Say, for instance, I had you tune my car with a Borla UEL header. Then I decided I'd rather have a Nameless UEL header and brought it back to you to retune. What changes, in general terms, do you suspect you'd have to make to my tune?