Stage 1

 

Stage 1 is a series of modifications that can be fitted on their own ( also called bolt-ons )  to a relatively stock car. This includes tunes that don’t require any special hardware, intake and exhaust upgrades and leave all the original catalytic converters intact. All of the above upgrades can be done of course, and will give greater gains at times, but they aren’t mandatory.

If you choose to do the upgrades along with the tune, you will see bigger gains. One thing we have to notice – it’s not as simple as adding up the separate gains for each bit of hardware and the software together in the end. Engines nowadays are pretty complex and every upgrade doesn’t add up to performance gaining each and every time.

 

Engine remapping

 

Upgrading a modern car all times needs a new tune. The way this is done involves our state of the art tools in order to read the software that’s already in your ECU. ECU stands for Engine Control Unit, and controls everything like spark, fuel, timing, boost as well as hundreds of other sensors. After we read the ECU, we alter software accordingly to each stage and upgrade the car has, in order to make the car more efficient and powerful. By performing an upgrade like this, we can safely control the engine while improving performance in much better ways than parallel ECUs do, which most of the times lie to the ECU in order to extract some power out of it.

Tunes are made in different ways. Once upon a time, “chipping” a car involved opening the ECU each and every time, in order to de-solder the EEPROM off of the pcb inside the ECU, and either read that chip and write back to it and re-solder it back to the pcb, or replace the chip with an already tuned chip that most of the times had tunes that weren’t even tested. This is how the world coined the term “chipping” a car or car chip tuning. Nowadays on most cars we need less equipment but more time in order to tune a car. On most of today’s cars this can be done through the diagnostic port or OBD and the reading and writing of the ECU needs just some minutes. Some newer cars need to be “benched” which means that we need to remove the ECU from the car, and connect to it via the onboard pins it has, in order to gain access to it. Lastly, some very few ECUs need to be “booted” and what that means is we need to remove the ECU from the car, and open it in order to expose the pcb. We don’t have to de-solder anything but we need to solder some pins to it, in order to read and write to it. As protocols upgrade and excel, ECUs that were only being able to be booted, are now being able to be benched and in the end to be made by OBD. While this might sound scaring, its not, since our modern tools cost thousands of Euros, and they are built specifically to read and write the ECUs in a very careful way so there aren’t any problems with your ECU after tuning. We take pride in the tools we use, as they are the most expensive and delicate to treat your ECU with respect. We will never use cheap Chinese knock-offs so your ECU is safe with us.

Depending on the engine, you can see significant power increases from the software alone. For example the current 7th generation Golf GTI goes from 245HP to 295-313HP while the current Fiesta ST climbs from 200HP up to 233-252HP. However, this is not the case with every car as every car isn’t that potent, its depended on the hardware that the manufacturer installed, and how much potency is left in it. Some engines come very pushed from the factory, and some is shared with a higher spec model and its just detuned. In that case the power unlock can be great, without sacrificing the longevity of the engine.

In all honesty, you can just install a good tune and call it a day. The software after it gets installed, need 80-150km in order to complete its adaptations and take maximum effect on the car. You will see that the car gets better and stronger after said kilometres.

 

Air intakes

 

Tuning a modern turbo petrol or diesel engine for higher boost, you need to take into consideration of the air coming in the engine. The colder the air, the denser the air, therefore most performance can be squeezed out of the engine. Keeping the engine fed with cold air, helps in both performance as well as longevity of that power. While a car is boosting, air is compressed and therefore gets much hotter. A cold air intake helps serving nice cold air into the engine, and while the revs per minute climb, the air needs to be cold in order to keep power up to the redline. A well designed air intake helps in this, and manufacturers spend a lot of time in making this happen.

In modern cars, manufacturers increasingly design good air intakes so most of the times, you don’t have to do anything else to the car in order to make it more efficient. If the owner desires, he can just use a higher performance air filter. These drop straight into the original airbag and use a cloth filter instead of a paper one on the stock version that is less restrictive. People are lead to believe that a filter will increase performance, but most of the times it doesnt. Some other people think that a less restrictive filter will allow more air in the engine and hurt performance. The engine will suck the same amount of air, either with a paper or a cloth filter. So as an upgrade, it doesn’t add performance and it won’t hurt performance. What it does, is it gives a more metallic sound when it sucks air so car owners choose it for this.

 

Exhausts

 

WIth exhausts now, the performance can get changed significally. An exhaust from the catalyst and back, is normally when you see power increase even without a tune just with the stock software. By installing bigger pipes, the exhaust gas can flow more easily, therefore giving more performance to the car since the turbo can flow more air out faster. Unrestricting the exhaust at the same time as increasing the boost should see optimal benefits in giving more horsepower than just a tune. Manufacturers use high sophisticated exhausts with flaps on modern cars which help achieve better performance. While an exhaust is always a good choice, its not always needed and on smaller displacement cars, gains are minimal. Again its up to the owner to choose if he wants to invest on an aftermarket exhaust.

 

Lets get to an example: Stage 1 VW Golf Mk6 GTI

 

The Golf Mk6 GTI starts with 210HP. It has a 2.0 litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine, which is a very good platform when it comes to tuning. We  quote between 50 and 60 extra horsepower for our performance tune alone (this is different from car to car, according to fuel quality and other factors).

On many cars, we can fine tune our software for different quality fuel along with other settings.

On top of that, if you add a cloth high performance air filter, and a free flow exhaust, you can see some more gains, but that is up to the owner to decide.