We often see the dyno as the best place to test and tune a car – but a lot of the time it doesn’t represent the real world very well. Two areas where dynos fall short is in the cooling department (airflow across the intercooler and radiator can’t be replicated with most fans sitting in front of the car) and in how they load the car. Often the car is loaded too little or too much compared to what it sees on the road.

This can skew the results of the dyno tests and put the car under a lot more stress than you would side on the road.

This gives you a unique opportunity to REALLY see how the tune performs under a fairly extreme stress test. I build adaptive protection into all our Stratified tunes because even though most cars don’t experience what you’re about to see; some do on the track or dyno and the last thing we want is a blown up motor. The behaviour of the tune when stress tested like this is where you really get to see the quality of the tune. And this kind of protection is built into all our tunes, from Flash Tunes to the full custom tunes.

This car has very few modifications and I had no idea how the dyno facility was setup or cooled. Nor did I know that they were going to do 3 4th gear pulls back to back or I would have advised against this kind of torture. However, they did, and the graphs below are the results.

Mods:

2013 Focus ST

Cobb filter in stock intake box
Cobb Downpipe (catted)
Muffler delete
Stratified Tune – In Progress

knock prone 91 octane fuel and no other additives.

As you can see the charge air temperature peaked at 212 degrees! The ignition corrections remained mild from pull to pull and the car STILL made consistent power. Customer drove off the dyno and home with no drama not even knowing the kind of stress test his car just experienced.