njedwardz

Hello all,

I've been waiting to post this until my tune was in a more finalized state, and I figure now is as good a time as any.

To start with, I've a 2013 C6 A6 Base (which I purchased new) with a set of Pfadt headers, a Halltech MF107R intake, a set of B&B PRT mufflers, an auxiliary transmission cooler, and a 160* thermostat. The parts were installed locally, and the car was dyno and street tuned by the installer. The car made around 440/450 up from 370/380 (RWHP/RWTQ) I was satisfied with the job but something always felt missing. The car was certainly faster and better sounding than before, but it lacked the refinement that I was looking for. Everything performed wonderfully on track, aside from some heat issues which we just have to live with in south LA. The only problem is, I go to the track maybe 2 times a year, and this is my only vehicle. For me, everything has to be perfect.

Now, the tuner was indeed willing to work with me to get the tune perfect, but the issue was, surprisingly enough, that he was willing to modify whatever parameters I asked him to. This might sound strange of me to say, but with these cars that's not the right attitude. I'll touch on that in a bit.
The other problem was that this shop had become insanely popular. Like, no parking spots and essentially a waiting list just to get in to talk about the car. They've been doing a large number of 800-1000 hp builds over the past year, so my little 450 build (unintentionally) fell lower on their priorities. The people at this shop really are great, but they just didn't have the time to work out the issues like I wanted. I'll probably go back in the future for any installs I don't feel comfortable doing in my garage.

After dealing with some heat and slight flaring issues, as well as being unable to get the shift points and feel just right, I decided to give Chuck a call over at Corvettes of Westchester. Initially it was just to toss around ideas, cause the guy seemed to know what he was talking about from the forum posts.

My first call with Chuck took around 2 hours, just talking about the mods to the car and what I didn't like about the way it drove and how he thought we could improve it. Turns out that the previous installer bypassed the transmission cooler in the radiator when they installed the auxiliary cooler, which was contributing to my heat issues. Chuck told me he couldn't promise that his tune would necessarily help with that part of the problem without me having the coolers re-routed, but that he could make the car drive even better.

At the time, I wasn't really interested in his Booster; I wasn't keen on the idea of swapping my PCM and I was honestly pretty skeptical of the product as a whole. I wasn't an expert, but it seemed like something that any other tuner would be able to do. I would find out that I was pretty wrong about that...

I spend another hour or two on the phone with him a week later, and ended up ordering the Booster, his engine and transmission tunes, and an EFILive AutoCal tuning device. It took quite a while to get everything due to some backups with Chuck's suppliers, but everything was pretty easy to install. I did some datalogging with the stock tune, and he made modifications accordingly. The Halltech intake has proven to be difficult to calibrate with the A6 transmission, and we're still playing around with it, but I think we've got the tuning almost completely knocked out. There are still a few shift issues that we need to dial in, but I don't doubt that we can get them knocked out pretty quick.

After I sent my old tune to Chuck, we found out that the previous tuner had completely disabled certain parts of the tune (like the volumetric efficiency tables). These changes, from what Chuck says, are typically made to cars with forced induction systems, modified displacements, or drastically different cams. My car meets none of these criteria (yet), so I found it pretty odd that this was done. TECHNICALLY it's ok to do this but it just doesn't make sense in a stock engine scenario. There were also some weird things in the idle (aside from the higher startup air that I had asked the tuner for so that it would be a little louder starting up) that we were fixed even with Chuck's first tune. We are currently running my old MAF frequency curve to troubleshoot some issues with the transmission and see if they are related to the Halltech intake (and the issues seem to have disappeared for now).

So there's a few things you should know about Chuck if you're thinking about his products:

1. He's sometimes difficult to get in touch with. He's generally always busy working with customers, either at his shop or over the phone.

2. When you do get to talk to him, he will spend as long as you need to make sure that you're on the same page as him. Most of my conversations with him have far exceed an hour each. If you want something explained, he'll give it to you in whatever technical level you want.

3. The booster really is as good as people say it is. I don't have any experience with it on the track yet, but for daily driving it is both more precise and more fun. I was really worried about losing my top end throttle resolution (i.e. the top 30% of the throttle feeling useless), but I haven't experienced that at all.

4. From the discussions that I've had with Chuck, I'm confident that he really is the only one who's able to make these modifications in this way. Without going into too much detail, he has access to certain areas of the tune that other tuners don't (regardless of what software package they use). If you're skeptical, I'm confident that Chuck would be willing to explain it to you over the phone. I'm also very sure that if others could offer this service, they would. I didn't notice any change in my throttle response with my first tuner(other than more power everywhere due to increased timing and better overall airflow), and the change was huge going to Chuck's tune.

5. Going off what I said at the beginning, pretty often Chuck WILL NOT change things that you ask him to. Why? Isn't the customer always right? Well, in some industries, they are. In this one, most of the time they aren't. If you were to ask my old tuner to mess with the shift pressures in a particular area, he would. And then you'd go back and ask him to do something else to them, and he would. And this process would continue for some time until your tune was so mucked up that it wouldn't resemble any sane A6 tune at all. If you ask Chuck to make those changes, he's gonna say no, then he's gonna explain why that change is a bad idea and ask you what you want to accomplish with that change, and then he's gonna tell you what he CAN do that will do exactly what you wanted in the first place in a more efficient way that won't mess the calibration up. Obviously if you're insistent on changing something, he'll do what you ask, but he knows the tuning game a lot better than the majority of owners, and probably better than quite a few tuners out there.

So, overall, I would give Chuck a definite YES. Like I said, I was really skeptical that I would be just throwing away $xxxx to get a tune that was different than my current one and not necessarily better, but I was just blown away. The shift times were just cut down to nothing (and it shifted fast as hell before), and on most of the shifts it's smooth as butter. The downshifting is significantly more progressive than the stock tune (throttle acts as on/off switch) or my old tune (basically 3 pedal positions) and you REALLY have to want whatever the last downshift is (which I think is a very good idea). I never seem to end up in a gear that I don't expect, and that used to happen pretty frequently.

I've really enjoyed having the AutoCal because it allows me to be a lot more involved in the tuning process. Many customers won't be interested in what changes are being made, but I was sort of in the dark about the last tune so I wanted to stay on top of it this time. There are so many systems that can be modified in these cars it's staggering. My previous tuner basically tuned a few parts in the engine and a few parts in the transmission and for the most part they ended up working as separate entities. With Chuck's tune, everything functions together as a complete system. As I said, the tune isn't finalized, but it just feels a lot more refined than it did before.

I will say this: I have nothing against my previous tuner or anyone who works there. I think they're great people and I will most likely continue to give them my business. I think that if I had a standard transmission they would have been a great company to stick with, just because they aren't nearly as complex. So if y'all see this, please don't take it the wrong way. I know they've been super busy and honestly I didn't want to seem like I was wasting their time having them make little tiny changes to my tune because it was "almost perfect" but not quite enough for me. For a lot of procedures on the car, I lack the tools and experience that they have, and from what I've seen the other shops in the area don't come close to the work quality I got from them (I had one shop forget to torque my lug nuts after plasti-dipping my wheels and lost 2 nuts on the way home...think I'd trust them to install a cam?).

I have plans to take the car further in the future, and my next step will involve a Pro Torque converter from Chuck and possibly one of his rear end packages as well. Eventually I want a cam or FI on the car(probably both, in that order), and I plan to stick with Chuck to do the tuning on the package. Honestly I will most likely not pursue one of Chuck's cam packages just because I don't have another car to drive so I won't be throwing it in in the garage overnight; because of that I would rather have the old tuner put in one of their custom sticks and have them put in a rudimentary tune for Chuck to finalize. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot more complicated but there's a method to my madness (can't think of what it is right now though, lol).

I know I've rambled on but to sum it up: If you're looking for a very high quality mail order tune for your car and want better throttle response and a hugely improved transmission, give Chuck a call and just throw around some ideas. I think you'll see that he knows what he's doing.

To Chuck: I sent you an email last night with some ideas. Let me know what you think if you get a chance. I'll try to get a solid datalog to you later this week.

0Chuck CoW

Thank you very much for the great write up! Most appreciated!

Chuck CoW