Originally Posted by
MattMPS3
Can I give you some advice,
-Firstly cancel the MRT booking, drive to the other side of town and go talk to Jim and the boys at tunehouse, not just because they are forum sponsors, but because they are consistently producing bigger power, more efficiently than MRT are capable of.
The forum has unfortunately seen one too many bad reports of MRTs workmanship and it has tarnished their reputation. In my opinion Brett is a great salesman and marketer, but Jim is a great tuner who takes an insane amount of pride and passion in his work.
I work relatively close to MRT, yet still have all my servicing work done by tunehouse on a Saturday, tunehouse show a level of professionalism rarely seen these days
-Secondly, before you tune, buy a downpipe. it will give you loads of power and open up your top end power considerably.
-What Brett is saying about intercoolers is true in one regard, and crap in another, intercoolers are not necessarily a power mod so to speak, they do however allow the turbo to do its job more efficiently and also with the added cooling properties allow a denser air charge to enter the combustion cycle, think of it more as, they reduce the amount of power robbed by the stock system, FMICs are great (I have one), but they are costly and labour intensive to fit, aftermarket TMICs are becoming a lot more available, and are showing good results for a fraction of the cost (and can be quickly removed in the event of a warranty related issue), they will suffer from the same heatsoak as the stock unit due to their location, but do cool down a lot quicker once the car is moving, the gen 2's probably arent as badly affected by heat soak as the gen 1s were due to the scoop.
To give you an example, the stock intercooler robs 4psi across its core, i.e to produce 18psi at the manifold, the pre intercooler pressure needs to be 22 psi, most aftermarket intercoolers will only see a 1-2 psi drop, while doing a better job of cooling as most are made using more efficient bar and plate style cores.
-DONT TUNE UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED, if you go and tune the car now and pay a small fortune for your ECUTEK tune, then fit a downpipe or intercooler, you will need to retune if you want to take full advantage of your added mods, leave the tune until the end of your bolt on mods, also with the imminent release of the AP, e-tuning will become a very real option in the future, there are some tuners in the US who know these engines far more intimately than both tunehouse and MRT.
In my opinion spend your money on a downpipe and IC upgrade first, you will see good gains from these two upgrades, then think about tuning.