Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Minist)

[west_minist]

Before you could hit max power, the rev limit is already there. Well when you install v8, you will know what 6000+ feels like and we can determine if the extra rom helps.

v8 contains many last changes to add that final touch.

[teK--]

will rise the rev limit for v8 to an acceptable test one. Send me the results once I release it to you with Dyno's. I think you will love it if have those corners where the stock rev limit caused issues

I know what you mean; 3rd gear only goes up to around 100kph from memory. Next corner is too close to shift up and back down, so it'd be nice to have a slightly higher redline!

[west_minist]

Thanks for your feedback. I will get him to go a 0-xxx pull and post the vid to see the fall back range. From the Dynoes, it seems that as soon as she starts to make a little power, the stock rev limit just kills it. We will see.

[west_minist]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 5:42 PM
To: west_minist@xtremeracingtuning.com
Subject: Re: v8 - results

Thank you very much for your work, Edward. It been a truly rewarding experience and I've learned a lot from it.

You are definitely a master of your art and I'll make sure to spread the good word for you and get you some continued business. Your services are very real, very high quality and produce phenomenal results for what is really not a lot of money for your effort involved.

[west_minist]

v8 3rd Gear Dyno-rpm IAT=17C Pull 1

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 11:17 AM
To: Edward Millington
Subject: Re: v8 - results

Edward, you are a scary, scary man. You have turned my car into pure evil with this ROM!

The throttle response from v8 is phenomenal - it ramps up the rpms so quickly no matter what gear you are in! I also didn't think the new rev limiter would make that much of a difference, but in a basic 0-100 test, being able to change gear later has allowed the car to get an approximate time of 7-7.5 seconds!! That is INSANE! I will have to formally time this with the appropriate equipment one day.

Revving right through the range , I could feel the power flatten off a bit at about 5,500rpm, but it still climbed up pretty quickly from there to 6,500rpm (I haven't been game to take it all the way to 7,000rpm yet
- the engine is revving seriously fast up there). It feels like such a long gear when revving that far, but it has made a very positive difference.

I'm not sure how, but the throttle is somehow lighter and more responsive than v7 is again - it's VERY responsive and touchy underfoot to blips in the throttle and I found that the car rolls along on its own inertial force more easily with less resistance from the engine slowing it down.

I only did one pull tonight because frankly, it scared me. The extra high rev limit meant I actually ran out of road and had to brake hard before I hit the rev limiter, but I did get past 6,000rpm.

Fourth gear at 2,000rpm shows the car pick up 5kph in just under 2.5 seconds when flat to the floor.

There is a lot of meat between 2,000rpm and 4,000rpm - every gear, even fifth on the highway, pulls excellently, with the best performance occurring from 3,000rpm in high gears. You can go as low as about 1,800rpm before the car starts to shudder a bit because the gear is too high for that speed. 1st and 2nd gears just rip up the road in a very linear fashion all the way to 4,500-5,000rpm.

I attempted a "stole it" run, but because of the sheer pickup in speed of the car and the fact that it's a very dark night, I'll really need to go find a good twisty mountain drive during the day to do it some justice - there are too many corners that I more or less have to come to a complete stop to ensure it's safe to get into, and doing it at night with nearly no street lights doesn't help. I need a long winding mountain road to really see what this car can do now.

You have provided a very "turbo" feel to the car now. Lag is non-existent. Lurching between gears is non-existent. I can now go very deep into the gears before changing. The car does not in any way shape or form feel like a 2.5 litre car. It feels like something much more powerful and is going to leave a lot of my passengers fooled. It is now, for all intents and purposes, a weapon.

I'll be able to test this properly this weekend. I'm just not being able to get absolute hard results driving in suburban areas, at least not without risking drawing unwanted attention to myself!

More feedback tomorrow when I can do some general day driving.

Cheers!

Jeff.

[HyRax]

Don't need to post my update - Edward's done it for me!

I will add further posts when I achieve a full tank of normal city driving so everyone can see what my new fuel economy is like and will comment again after I get my major service done.

In the meantime, for anyone who has never considered tuning before, especially for a non-turbo vehicle thinking it's not worth it, I would put Edward's services as one of those "must do" items on your shopping list, right up there with other bang-for-your-buck mods like swaybars (which I'll be doing next after the service so i can enjoy those twisty mountain drives a bit more).

I cannot emphasise enough just how much the car has literally been transformed, and remember that my 2.5i is composed of 100% stock components - as-is from factory. It is a totally different car now to the stock tune and in fact I cannot believe that Subaru actually sell their cars in such a heavily detuned state. The difference is simply chalk and cheese.

To those who would toss up between spending money buying an aftermarket exhaust for the cosmetic and/or aural factor, or doing an XRT tune, I would tell them to go for the tune first every time. You will get far superior value for your money using Edward's services, and then you can look at getting an exhaust done later (and have Edward update your tune for it too!).

I would like to publically thank Edward again for his work. It's been an honour to be his first 2.5i tune and now every other 2.5i owner can benefit from his efforts. It only took 12 late evenings, 14 ROM revisions, four tanks of fuel, more than 1,600 kilometres of test driving, and a partridge in a pear tree to arrive at what I've got now, and while I haven't seen the final comparison dyno graph yet, on paper we've achieved at least an 8% improvement in power and a 10% improvement in torque over stock. For an NA car with no mods, that's a lot. By measurement of the Seat-of-Your-Pants (TM), the car accelerates like a wild animal, pressing you back into the seat, is super-responsive to light changes in the throttle which in turn has dramatically increased the driveability of the car. It now wants to be driven.

Edward - you are a tuning god. Thank you.

[HyRax]

I know what you mean; 3rd gear only goes up to around 100kph from memory. Next corner is too close to shift up and back down, so it'd be nice to have a slightly higher redline!

That must be the limit for a 6MT box? My 5MT third gear goes to 133kph (as reported by the ECU - it reaches 140kph on the speedo) before it hits the stock limit of 6,300.

[teK--]

I know what you mean; 3rd gear only goes up to around 100kph from memory. Next corner is too close to shift up and back down, so it'd be nice to have a slightly higher redline!

That must be the limit for a 6MT box? My 5MT third gear goes to 133kph (as reported by the ECU - it reaches 140kph on the speedo) before it hits the stock limit of 6,300.

5MT here. I wonder if they changed the ratios in the facelift models because I'm pretty sure my 3rd is around 100kph at 6000rpm. I don't push it much higher than that in the mountains because I'd rather watch the road than the speedo to avoid bouncing off the limiter.

[west_minist]

Hyrax,

After v5 really, it was all about response. The dynoes are almost all the same. What would show different, is the time to 100 or to 200kmph.
Update: I posted the results above.

I have a customer in Germany that run up to 250kmph lol

A dyno cannot show how responsive an engine is from a power pull.

Thank you for your kind words. I hope everyone see that it was just taking your car on the Dyno, drop a based map, clean it up and hand you a car that could be better.

If you had the money, I would do a local tune to compare. I get many people who do local tuning come back to me and ask me what I think of their car. Thats interesting.

[west_minist]

I think the only way to see how the car really perform is run it against another 2.5i just to see how each car walks away when test against each other

Example, the tuned car drives behind and then switches to the front. Thats always nice for both owners to see whats going on.

[west_minist]

I may rename this thread, but its good info for new 2.5i persons.

Here is the Engine Load curve to see why the engine feels this way. Really and truly in racing, you change just pass 6000rpm, but on tracks and so forth, the extra rpm space helps.



Custom cams would really help this model as a nice mod.

It seems the car feels best between 4500-6000rpm range. Not really much for a 2.5i. Maybe a DOHC or better cams could widen this range. Interesting.

Any 2.0R persons reading this thread?

Hyrax, can you post in the 2.0 section? Need to get to work. Lets beg a 2.0R owner to get and tune and see what that engine curve and response looks like.

[west_minist]

http://www.xtremeracingtuning.com/forum ... f=48&t=402

I came across Edward and XRT quite by accident when perusing the Australian Liberty forums. Initially I didn't pay too much attention as he was "just another tuner" but I noticed that a lot of people were posting up crazy reviews about this guy who was able to achieve tuning amazing results without ever seeing or sitting in your car. This intrigued me as I didn't know you could tune-by-email.

As I explored further I discovered the wonders of RomRaider and open source tuning and wanted to know more. The idea of tuning my own car didn't enter my head until I saw a post from Edward asking if anyone would like to explore the idea of tuning a 2.5i. I looked around and found that no-one had answered his call, so I had no way of determining whether or not anyone else had done it and if there were any results to examine to decide if I wanted to do it myself.

Edward had, however, tuned a lot of 3.0 cars. Since they are NA I figured that they can't be too different to my 2.5i. I read several 3.0 reviews and they were all glowing. Some of the improvement figured reported were downright amazing.

Since I couldn't find any negative opinion about Edward other than the paranoid types who think that plugging a laptop into a car is a good way to turn it into an all-wheel-drive brick, I took the plunge and emailed Edward some questions, which he promptly answered right away. Yes, he'd never done a 2.5i before and was looking for a suitable candidate. What also surprised me was his price - it was very cheap and this also spurred me on to consider taking him on.

But I was still up in the air about tuning a 2.5i. It's only a 2.5i after all, so it can't possibly improve as much as you can improve a 3.0 or a GT, surely? Edward asked me to send him a copy of my car's stock ROM so he could examine it and compare it to a 3.0 to evaluate where gains could be made. I went and bought a Tactrix OpenPort 2.0 cable and got him a ROM. I figured even if he wasn't able to support it, I could have some fun monitoring the car with the cable.

The next day Edward gets back to me and says the 2.5i and 3.0 ROMs are different beasts, but they do share a number of similar tables and Edward found other areas in the 2.5i ROM that he thought could use some tweaking. In short, he would definitely be able to support it and some gains should be achievable. I had already figured if I can get the driveability of the car improved, especially from-standstill acceleration, then this would be a Good Thing (TM). I was still with the expectation that I couldn't expect much in the way of more power or torque from a 2.5i, though.

Well, I was proved wrong. Very wrong.

It only took 12 late evenings, 14 ROM revisions, four tanks of fuel, more than 1,600 kilometres of test driving, and a partridge in a pear tree to arrive at what I now enjoy today - a road weapon! Edward has increased my power from 101kw at the wheels stock to 111kw, and raised my torque from 175nm stock to 193nm! That's 10% on both sides! For a naturally aspirated car with no modifications, that is massive! On top of that, my throttle is now incredibly responsive responding to the lightest of touches. The car is so easy to drive, doesn't feel "heavy" anymore and feels like a car that wants to be driven now, instead of being sedate and boring. The difference is so massive, that it's like comparing chalk to cheese and I am absolutely shocked that Subaru would sell these cars in such a massively detuned state.

To those who believe that just because your car is low-capacity and non-turbo that you can't expect any performance improvements, I am telling you right now that you are wrong. Edward has the expertise to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your hardware, and while mods can help, my improvements have come without a single modification - I am 100% stock and I am absolutely loving the car now.

Edward spends the time to properly custom tune your car not only for best performance but to your driving style. You tell him what you want and he delivers. You don't have to be a car expert either - just tell him in plain english what you feel out of the car, how you'd like it to feel and Edward will translate that into the technical modifications required. Your car is FINE-TUNED to ensure it's clean and most of all, SAFE. Safe for your engine and a more responsive car will also make it safer for you as the driver to be able to immediately respond to situations on the road. You will gain more power and torque and the tune will actually be safer for engine longevity than even the factory tune is which in my case showed how easily it could ping under regular high load! FOr the greenies out there, Edward will also deliver a fuel saving too, so his tune will quickly pay for itself over the next couple of years of refilling.

If you only ever do one thing to your car in its lifetime, then make it an XRT tune. It's cheaper than wasting money on buying a full exhaust system for fat sound or bling wheels to look good. A tune gets you so much more out of your car. It's the best bang-for-your-dollar investment you can make.

It has been an honour being Edward's first 2.5i to tune and now every other 2.5i owner can reap the benefits as well. I would also encourage anyone with a 2.0R to come forward and let Edward bestow the XRT nectar to you - you won't regret it! Subaru NA cars are actually really good cars!

Edward is a tuning master. He is always available on email and IM (he never sleeps!), he encourages you to ask questions and he will ask them of you too. He is very open and approachable and this level of communication makes working with him an absolute pleasure. I just cannot recommend XRT highly enough to you if you want to extract extra performance out of your car for minimum outlay. Why are you still reading this? Email Edward NOW!

[HyRax]

Here is the Engine Load curve to see why the engine feels this way. Really and truly in racing, you change just pass 6000rpm, but on tracks and so forth, the extra rpm space helps.

One day I'll get around to doing a track day at Wakefield Park (two hours south of Sydney) - haven't done one in ages.

Hyrax, can you post in the 2.0 section? Need to get to work. Lets beg a 2.0R owner to get and tune and see what that engine curve and response looks like.

Done!

[HyRax]

Update on how the car feels after five months

Five months on, and I've since had a major service (Interval J) which included new spark plugs.

The car is still going strong and hasn't skipped a beat. There have been no issues arising from the tune or mechanically in general. I have not made any engine mods yet.

Edward was right on the money when he believed my spark plugs were worn and due for replacement. The new spark plugs are now providing a smoother response (providing a "cleaner" feel, but this doesn't mean it feels more "powerful" than before). No doubt the fresh oil and upper engine clean have helped here too.

I've yet to get Edward some fresh logs to see if any extra improvements can be made with the new spark plugs as I'm waiting for the weather to cool off a bit and for the humidity to drop a bit.

I'm not expecting any major improvements after the new logs, but you never know what Edward may discover.

[west_minist]

I am glad you are working well after the service. Please, regardless of conditions, please send a log including all types of driving with all parameters we usually log.

A/F Sensor #1 (AFR)
Engine Load (4-Byte)* (g/rev)
Engine Speed (rpm)
Feedback Knock Correction (4-byte)* (degrees)
Fine Learning Knock Correction (4-byte)* (degrees)
Intake Air Temperature (C)
Knock Correction Advance (4-byte)* (degrees)
Throttle Opening Angle (%)
Vehicle Speed (kph)

Please make sure "Fast Polling Mode" is enable.

Thank you.

West_MInist