It took me some time to decide whether i should buy the spring booster or not, finally i puled the trigger and i am very glad i did. I got the newest version which comes with the 3 mode stock, medium, and aggressive. You feel the difference right away, the throttle response is so much better and its more fun for me to drive the car now. It does not add any power what so ever but if feels faster since there is no lag and the transmission shifts so much more smooth. Who ever doesn't have a sprint booster most definitely i do recommend you go get one. Totally worth it i give it a 10

 

Agreed my friend. I picked one of these up last week and totally love it. It especially helps when you need to pass people at highway speeds. Have fun with your new toy.

 

Whats the needs for an over boosted throttle responce? I never felt lag ever in my 08 and when I need to pass I just manually bump the car down a few gears and have a party.

Also the sprintbooster doesnt effect the shifting of the trans

 

Please understand that the sprintbooster is nothing but an amplifier. All it does is make the throttle more sensitive by opening the throttle plate by more than the pedal sensor input for a given travel. i.e. the throttle is wide open at about 60% of pedal travel depending on setting. Thus the last 40% of pedal travel does nothing. Accelerating harder does the same thing. If you like the feeling - Great!

The SB does not reduce throttle lag or latency. That is built into the ECU & can only be corrected in the ECU. It does not increase performance.

 

Glyn knows what he is talking about!
Sprint booster reduces throttle control by electronically shortening pedal distance and might fool you into thinking lag is gone, but does not reduce lag at all - it's truly impossible for it to reduce the lag because it is only altering the signal from the gas pedal - not from the ECU to the engine. This is verified by reviewing their patent filing which explains how the product works as an amplifier. There are dozens of threads about this and a very good white paper that explains it. There is also a thread in which the Sprint Booster people participated and were unable to prove our statements or the white paper wrong with any facts or material of their own. Please search and read about it.

 

It actually makes the car very annoying to control in traffic and parking situations because you have to push the gas so carefully due to the shortened distance of the useful pedal travel. 3/4 of the way down and you're flooring the engine.

I do have to disagree about the lag though, these vehicles are extremely laggy and I do wish there were a real way to reduce the lag - I'd be all over it.

 

It definitely is a cool little device, I loved mine, recently sold it.

 

I am not disagreeing with what you guys have to say, but once you have it on its a different feeling while driving and for me it was worth getting it i simply like it a lot.

 

You are allowed to like it. You are not making nonsense claims.

 

This is always an easy one to settle quickly from all that I have read and my personal experience having one in my C350. I know it does not increase horsepower or make the car faster from 0 to 60...

"All it does is make the car think the pedal is being pushed further down than it actually is", "I can do the same thing with my foot", "it is all in your head", the """scientific""" white paper proves", cannot control the throttle in traffic???" ...These opinions are from those who have Never had a sprintbooster or drove a car with one installed.

"The car is much more reactive from the hole as well as on the highway when passing", this is how the car should have come from the factory", I enjoy driving my car in daily situations much more since installed", "best $300 I have spent on this car","easily adapted to the response - green mode is perfect in traffic", These are from those of us with the sprintbooster in our cars - It is an excellent product.

Couple things:

I read recently that it was not favorable in a turbocharged 250, cannot disagree as I only have experience with my naturally aspirated car. Some knucklehead in that thread said they were arguing against the product for years??? wth? Why argue against something you never tried? And what gain is there trying to talk someone else out of it?

The white paper that is often mentioned is well written and has a couple nice graphs - far from scientific, as the guy who did it was trying his best to push the gas pedal the same distance and speed but all with the human element involved - it does do what he set out to do, prove the sprintbooster does not make the car faster, which the company never claims to do..Proves nothing about the fun factor it adds to everyday driving.

I highly recommend this product - I truly appreciate driving this car more now than I can explain without somebody actually sitting in my car and driving it - if you do not like it - You Never Tried It....guaranteed.

 

I have certainly tried a number of generations of sprint booster out of sheer technical interest. I have always ended up giving them to friends. If you like it thats fine. We live in a free world. I have no problem whatsoever with people saying that they like the sensation as long as they understand what it is doing.

 

Hey, your opinions are fine. I was the "knucklehead" in the thread. I've driven Sprint Booster-installed Mercedes. Many of us have been posting about how the product does not reduce lag for years. I'm sorry that you don't understand the white paper, but it clearly explained with scientific data and graphs that it does not reduce lag. Regardless of the white paper, reduction of lag by a SB simply isn't possible and if you understood the engineering you would realize that. The SB only alters the signal the throttle sends to the ECU. The signal from throttle to ECU is instantaneous - it is simply sending the position of the gas pedal and how quickly it was moved to or from whichever position. The SB amplifies this signal so that it looks as if you pressed the gas pedal faster and further down than you did. This makes the entire last 1/4 of the gas pedal travel nearly useless. The only way to reduce lag would be to modify the signal coming from the ECU to the engine / transmission. The lag occurs within the ECU *after* it gets the throttle signal. The lag is not from the throttle to the ECU. The SB only alters this signal from the throttle to the ECU.

SB does not reduce lag. Period. It amplifies the throttle signal and reduces the useful throttle distance.

If you enjoy the effect that the product has (and it certainly does have an effect!) then that is perfectly fine. I just don't like it when people misunderstand the product and make false statements about what the SB can and cannot do. It cannot reduce lag. It does not reduce lag. You can achieve the same with your foot in a non SB vehicle. I wish it did reduce lag, I really do because I'd have one in my car.

And by the way - there are plenty who tried it and agree. Scroll down in the W204 forum - there is a user who recently bought it and is returning it since it didn't reduce his lag. Guaranteed!

Since these threads always devolve into very silly useless argument and all of the proper facts are readily available for a logical person to make up their own mind about the SB, I will not argue further in this thread unless it is to post something useful / substantial. Have a very happy holiday!

 

Can i be your friend?

 

i agree...i bought this product knowing it wouldn't increase hp...300 bux to have the car shift and feel like a sports car is worth it

 

here we go.... I feel like every SB thread there is either a debate,bashing, or arguments.

 

There is one more thing that it does change, it changes the characteristic curve of the pedal vs TB motion graph. The oem is nonlinear, with little slope initially, and steep slope at the end ... a "hold water" type curve (w/o getting into 2nd derivative curve signs ....).

The SB uses linear, straight curves, according to the white paper test on an older model. Even if it used the same 100% pedal travel, it would feel like it had more response.

.

 

Hi, I have asked before but have not been able to get an answer.

With the old SB the car adjust itself back to the slow response, are there any users out there that have had the old version and switched to the 3 mode version? just want to know if you still need to do the reset every now and then?

 

I think the biggest thing that the SB does to argue against "you can push your foot further down and get the same result" is that you don't (or at least most people don't) drive their car by constantly "flooring it" or being EXTREMELY heavy on the pedal ALL THE TIME. What the sprint-booster does essentially does this all the time with minimal foot movement. So because you are only putting the pedal down a bit (but the car is accelerating much faster) you have a sense of feeling "faster" and the car is used to constantly doing double-downshifts (entirely skipping a gear which the 7G-Tronic can do) giving the desired effect.

So essentially, a SB will give you the desired downshifts for strong pulls nearly everytime without having to ALWAYS floor your gas pedal to the metal.

 

Has anyone tried it and DON'T like it nor recommend it?

 

Absolutely correct Kevin! as usual!

 

After all the debates and then making the purchase? Of course not!

Read below:

http://mindhacks.com/2007/12/17/cogn...nce-reduction/


jctevere makes a valid point the OE industry understands as well. Mr prior company attached gauges to throttles and allowed folks in a research project to drive around for an extended period. When the data was analyzed (and I do not remember the numbers), they were surprised at how little throttle angle was used by most drivers and how almost non-existent were occurrences of wide open throttle. In follow up work, they did conclude that most folks are not comfortable pressing to WOT. To the degree that drivers here are also so disinclined to move their foot, as if it somehow just doesn't feel natural to them, the SB can do that for them. That sense of relief, while still getting the result, may be the basis of many of the SB fans, as technically, we all understand nothing else changes.

 

Being a Mechanical Engineering Consultant, I've read and studied the WP, and it does not explain what you said it did. It does show about a .005 sec insignificant true lag reduction. But more throttle for a given 1/4 pedal input is a response improvement, as you described later, which some could correctly describe as a lag improvement in a more responsive pedal, ie, more go for the same throttle input.

See my response to Glyn below. If the WP Figs 1&3 are still true, it gives the most boost or highest gain in throttle response at low inputs, like up to 1/4 pedal travel. I'm not sure of the SB tech's info about "rate of change" as the total basis for the SB. Looks more to me like a linear curve is assumed, and rate of change is then used to create a linear response.

The only way to prove your theory here would be to directly input a step-function signal to the ecu of about 1/4 throttle and see what the lag is.

As always, an interesting discussion with you

BTW, I sent an e-mail to SB about "better response up to 100% pedal travel". No reply so I resent same email, and they said they had to send it to main engineers in England, UK, whatever. Still waiting ...

.

.

 

Great post, thanks! I agree with you and would love to be able to test my theory. The ".005 sec insignificant true lag reduction" I believe is simply because of the time it takes the user to move his / her foot down. With the SB the physical pedal travel is less, hence that .005 shaved off.

I don't think the 'response' improvement should be confused with lag reduction because you still end up with the same lag if you just pushed the pedal a bit further / faster on a non SB vehicle. Maybe you could explain your thought with regards to that in another way? I'm not sure I completely follow.

 

I'll try to express my opinion better. Lag has no ASTM or ASME definition (nor does displacement). Thus it can be applied in a wide range of cases. You apply it to an ecu delay, and others appl it to a "laggy throttle" w/o the SB. For an industrial machine, a variable reaction can lag an input event.

To test the ecu lag, a simple data-log of TB position vs Injector duty cycle (non-DI) would show this, I think.

.

 

This makes pretty good sense to me! I do wish the resources were available to scientifically test that. Based on my experience including driving an SB vehicle, the real lag comes from the ECU itself, but I have no fact to back that up.