You should be going much faster now since your wallet is lighter

 

What did Paramount Performance say that tuning your car would get you? Have to tried to verify their claims in any way since you had the work done?

 

Useally higher expectations than what you can realisticly get are the issue. With most tuning youll get better performance and economy. Both of which you should have baslined before and after...butt dynos are drasticly affected by the overly optimistic head dynos and neither are accurate

 

Brutal,glad you back on the forum. Nice to see down home advice.

 

I went down this road on my 1995 Corvette with there being a plethora of aftermarket bolt-ons and tweaks promising another 8 hp here and 15 hp there. When you already have an engine that is cranking out quite a lot of power for its size, it really takes some effort to get additional horsepower that you can actually feel and use in day-to-day driving. Certainly not possible by simple bolt-ons or tweaks.

Doug

 

You need to start by getting evidence. Make copies or gather any literature of any adverts by the company which show their claims of what they can do. Keep any receipts etc in relation to the work they did (allegedly) to your car. They contact them and give them the opportunity to explain/put right work/refund you. If they then fail to respond or stall or refuse to rectify the situation it should mean (in the UK anyway) you will have built a strong case against them for a refund/compensation.

 

What car do you have now, XK8 or R, what year, was it stock before the mod?

I have not heard PP mentioning 40-50 bhp from just a ECU tune, have they also done other things besides the ECU tune?

 

When you say you are taking your car to an ECU specialist, bear in mind that includes all Jaguar dealers/servicing agents and anyone who has the correct diagnostic equipment to read the read the ECU.

You can buy 'piggyback' engine tuners such as this one from ebay;

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/JAGUAR-S-Type-...d=p3286.c0.m14

But you have to very careful. This one makes out that it is suitable for the diesel S Type, the only 2.7 litre in the range, but lower down in the description it states itis not suitable for the diesel. I e-mailed the company to point out the mistake. They replied that there is a 2.7 litre petrol S Type and produced one mistaken listing of a S Type for sale in Ireland as 'proof'. I even e-mailed ebay to advise them, but the listing is still there. Spurious to say the least.

 

The ECU unit can be tuned whilst sitting in the car, if PP is able to I can't confirm, but I have done so myself with an ECU specialist for a pre 2006 car. The latter models are somewhat difficult as we didn't have the right tools, but managed too (younger models are easy ;-)).

You need to have the tools to read the data from the ECU, and then it will take some time to find the altered (assuming they did) data, as you need to compare it to the specific original maps. Would be interesting to know if they find it wasn’t altered at all.

40 to 50 bhp is rubbish; I think you could manage maybe 20 or so. As doing dynos with these supercharged cars is difficult (to get repeated a consistent number) one should factor in a relatively large error margin, that is even without taking all the other possibilities that influence a run on a dyno.

Paramount on their website claims 30 bhp, so I wonder why they would say to you 40-50 bhp.
Keep in mind that the leaner you go (that’s what you do to get more hp on these cars) the riskier it becomes to your engine. So you could tune the h…l out of it and get it nicely lean for maximum output, but don’t expect your engine to last.

Important question, did you do a before dyno and a after? What where the results?

 

My other car (until I sell it) is a 1995 Corvette and there were several sources for do-it-yourself tuning. The most interesting was offered by Carputing LLC for Chevy LT-1/LT-4 and LS-1 engines where you downloaded the software into a laptop, connect via an interface cable to the vehicle, and tune various parameters.

These types of kits were typically a few hundred dollars. Is there something similar for our cars?

Doug

 

I had a 2003 Cooper S that I had new ECU high performance software added. I noticed a difference in performance but when the car was subjected to a mandatory recall because of emission requirements, I had to restore the original ECU programming to meet Calif smog requirements before the dealer would perform the recall. The lesson here is if you live in California, be careful changing the ECU programming to increase performance - you might not pass the smog tests.