As a note, we are really impressed with the Cobb Tuning CAN hub. If you didn’t catch it in earlier articles, the CAN hub allows you to add 4 additional inputs into the car’s CAN stream without having to disconnect any devices. Before this device was available, you would have to have your tuner retask one of your little-used inputs like cruise control or canister purge to add any additional sensors and you would lose the functionality of that device. With the CAN hub, you don’t need to lose anything. We are using it to allow input from our flex fuel sensor and a fuel pressure sensor to do a low fuel pressure failsafe, important for a dual pump system like ours in case one pump fails. The Cobb CAN hub gets our vote for the product of the year!
Having a legitimate flex-fuel system is a huge convenience as well. Cobb’s system with the CAN Hub is the best integration of flex fuel on the market!
You know you are badass when you get two top tuners tuning your car at once. M-Engineerings, Mitch Mckee and Jason Carberry took a lot of time tuning our car. Starting with Cold start they worked carefully on scaling the MAF and fuel tables and spent a lot of time working on low speed and part throttle driveability. They also worked on the transmission control MAPs as well at this point. After slowly building the car’s compensation and torque tables, they then focused on tuning the car for power first on 91 octane pump gas then on pump E85. The whole time they stressed being very conservative in the tune.
Our car had baselined at 421 whp and 419 lb/ft of torque which is typical of what s stock DBA GT-R will do on this particular dyno. With careful tuning, M-Engineering was able to get an impressive 600 lb/ft of torque and 583 whp out of 91 octane pump gas which is outstanding for a bolt-on car with pump gas on this dyno. Next, it was time to set the flex-fuel blending and the tuning on E85.
Next with E85, the car knocked out even more impressive numbers. M-Engineering was being careful, tuning to limit torque and power to protect the engine’s bottom end but to maximize the area under the curve. The results were a nice flat torque curve artificially limited to 645 lb/ft from about 3500 rpm onward. This resulted in a nice flat and wide power curve holding 656 whp all the way to the rev limiter. The great tuning resulted in a very smooth powerband even with the dyno’s smoothing turned down. With the torque and power being held to just below the engine’s safe limit we have a super wide area under the power curve for great performance! Our car makes over 500 lb/ft of torque at 2700 rpm! The stock turbos are capable of much more power, just the connecting rods are not.
