jangy

I don't disagree with your stock claim. A baseline is a baseline. You are in Kuwait, so comparing dyno numbers from there to somewhere else is not gonna tell you much.

I have been saying this about the '06 built in '06 since BEFORE the cars were released. My cousin was working for IBM at the time and he was on a team working to move the maps for MBUSA. At the time, a member here attempted a build up of an '06 E55 and ran into some tuning issues, so I got involved. I contacted my friends at MBUSA Finance and they got word that MB has begun a campaign to make it harder for the tuners to do their thing. More specifically, he said that MB was worried mostly about tranny issues and that they had been forced to warranty a number of failures that they felt were due to tunes. Do a search, I have said this all along. I have also challenged ANYONE to post dynos, so that you can see the drop on the top end. It happens to every single one. RennTech thought it was a cooling issue. Others worry about belt slip. But, I think it is the car. There is always a fine balance between adding more boost and adding more drag to the engine.

MB_Forever

I thought a couple of members here with 05 and 06 models had RennTech stage 1 and showed pretty good dynos at around 450 to 460 rwhp with the "first-generation" RennTech pulley? (which I believe was smaller than their newer one)

How much power did those two E55 put out before and after the upgrade? And what was wrong with them?

jangy

It isn't the peak horsepower that is the real issue. The issue is at the top end, where the boost is highest. Now, if you go to an extreme and get that top end to dip enough, the max will also drop. All you need to do is look at the dynos. Pay attention to the A/F, the smoothness of the HP and TQ curves, and the flatness after peak of each.

A stock E55 has a pretty flat TQ curve and a steadily climbing HP curve all the way to redline. The TQ basically jumpst to just under 400 and peaks at around 450 and drops back to about 400. The A/F line basically goes from about 15:1 all the way down to 10:1 at redline. If you look close, it is very smooth but has some slight steps in it.

Then, you add a pulley. The added power comes from the pulley. Both cars ended up adding about 40HP and maybe even an added 10 from the tune (if any), but the driveability of the car went to ****. One car never got the top end thing fixed and so in my mind he paid just to raise the speed limiter. The other just had a really rough band and never got that worked out. There was always a dead spot in the curve. We also had an '04 take the bait and that one worked out (ok at best).

Now, another thing to keep in mind is that we are pushing it with the size of these pulleys. It goes back to a question that I asked months ago regarding the weight of the pulley. I am leaning towards thinking that a lighter weight pulley would help alleviate the lag, but then again it has to be strong.

Like I've said from day one. Lets see some data.

rflow306

My car is an 05 with a custom tune and has never had any problems. I have posted more dyno graphs than just about any one on this board. I have close to fifty dyno runs on my car ranging from stock to my current mods. You can do search on my posts to see them all, sorry to lazy to list all the links.

AMGfan

OT...Albert check your email...thanks.

Jon

MB_Forever

Jangy, I think those two cars should've contacted RennTech and showed them the concerns produced on the dyno. I truely believe that when RennTech or Kleemann develop a tune, they don't just higher a programmer and tell him to change some numbers, and then save those specs as a standard-map file. I think for every model, they'll take a car, put it on the dyno, establish a baseline, then start tuning it, then put it back on the dyno, then tune it again, then dyno again, then tune it again, etc...... until they find a good blance. After finding a good tune, they will then save that as a standard tune. And I think that is what Vadim is trying to do with Powerchip. They will continue to tune and dyno a car until they get a finalized tune that they like, then they will use that tune as a standard tune for all VR550 package cars. The only difference is Vadim and Powerchip are doing it publicly while the other tuners are doing it privately.

MB_Forever

So was your car tuned with the RennTech Stage 1 or was it custom RennTech tune?

rflow306

Not Renntech a non MB tuner.

MB_Forever

Do they tune 63 engines too......

jangy

In many regards, you are on the right track. BUT, the tuners do not have a need to develop a better tune. they are happy with the one that was developed for the '03 in '02. They are selling, so why worry. You think they are doing so much behind the scenes, but i haven't seen anything inovative out of teh big guys in a while. They are simply not in tune to us. I am sure they make great bank selling bling to customers at dealerships, though.

jangy

What size pulley are you running? By "no problems" do you mean you got gains and nice tuneability from the ECu or just that there haven't been issues? What was the gain on ECU alone? Thanks.

rflow306

I'm running an Asp pulley, never got to dyno my car with pulley alone but it made mid 460's rwhp with both.

jangy

Could you tell a real difference after the flash, or did you get both installed at the same time, too? Either way, do you have the duno graph of an ASP +tune? That would show if your top end got handled.

Vadim @ FD

We finally were able find TQ limiting maps and raise their limits.

Blue graph is stock car.

Red graph is with 175 mm pulley. On the street, rolling into the throttle we see a peak of 14.8 psi (11.6 stock) before opening bypass valve cuts it down to 12 psi. On the dyno going WOT right away results in loss of over 30HP, with TQ limiting cutting the boost down to stock levels an adding a lot of fuel to keep engine from making power.

Green graph is with TQ limiting maps raised. This corresponds to earlier gains from just a pulley with pre-2006 air pump recall software.

Next we are going to add tuning and I will be back on the dyno tomorrow for further tuning.

MB_Forever

Nice Vadim, this is looking very promising....... Does that read 438 rwhp with just pulley?

blackbenzz

Lean it out up top, car is running pig rich! Mo powa!

SLK55R

yeah should be interesting to see if they do what Jangy says they will do.

jangy

All I really asked is that they give it an honest effort and they are. I'm confident that they will get a nice tune on it soon, so I can move on to TB and headers (which will need another tune).

Now that we are getting some data to support what i have been saying, the real interest lies in what the others tuners will be willing to do for their clients? Do they continue to deny that it exists? Or, do they take one of your cars in and get the tune right?

vrus

It's already being done. The dyno bills alone that I've paid are already past what the ECU tune costs. We've spent countless hours of dyno time, ECU tuning time, datalogging time... We want it to be as perfect as possible so we wont stop on the car until we're satisfied.

The main point here is that the 2006 cars do exhibit the load limiters and if other tuners are just putting a standard tune on those cars, they are not going to show any power.

joshd

I have no clue how the flashing works on this car. But I'm curious ... is the entire program replaced when flashing or just the maps?

Meaning, if tuners are basing their flash on a pre 'secondary air pump flash' prior to the date of the addition of the load limiting features and replacing the entire program, they wouldn't run into this problem on any car, but they also wouldn't get the benefit of whatever else was added to the program by MB?

Or does the flash *just* replace the various maps (fueling, timing, etc.) which would mean they would hit the issue if they tried to flash a car with the load limiting in place?

If the whole program is being replaced, I would think that those older tunes might still work, albeit on older code that might have other issues fixed by MB in later flashes ...

just curious ... edumacate me please ;-)

vrus

There are many different revisions of ECU microcode and those revisions are also different based on model year. Different versions of the microcode may have the maps in different locations. OEMs do this to thwart aftermarket companies from tampering with their property but all it does is slow tuners down for a few weeks until the new microcode is reverse-engineered and the new location of the maps is discovered.

Now, saying all this, when the ECU is to be flashed by a tuner, they will typically read out the current ECU file, apply the changes and flash it back. They look for the offsets where the maps exist and then modify just those maps and then write it back to the ECU.

joshd

OK, thanks Victor, that makes sense. So the code is read out, maps replaced, and then all written back. So you end up with the same code with modified maps. So if 06 MY cars or cars with the updated load limiting code are flashed, they will likely suffer from this problem if the load limiting maps haven't been modified as well (as you have discovered). Thank you for doing all the hark work and investment to clear this up!

Now finish up the tune and then implement a flash loader with different maps so I can send you some money

Vadim @ FD

More data:


The graph above illustrates the importance of tuning.

Green is what happened when we installed 175 mm pulley on a stock car with air-pump recall software. As you can see TQ limiting software did not want to tolerate any additional boost and even went beyong, by losing addition 30HP.

Blue is when TQ limiting is raised with stock sofware parameters.

Red is with tuning - additional timing and less fuel.

In the end, after more than four weeks of tuning, we have reached our goal.

blackbenzz

Nice work Vadim Do you guys keep the afr slightly rich for safety reasons?

vrus

Just so you guys can see the numbers easily, that is: 465rwhp, 512rwtq with just a VRP pulley + ECU tune on a 2006 E55...

That's a nice 565hp, 625tq at the crank (18% driveline loss).. so I guess instead of calling it VR550 its going to be a VR565.