Total Performance Solutions

Paul’s GT500 is a super slick ride – sporting a Ford Racing TVS blower at 20psi, aftermarket plenum, aftermarket throttlebody, upgraded heat exchanger we made a bit more power than the factory clutch would handle. It slipped its way to 620rwhp and 600ftlb of torque… through the factory cats and exhaust system! Expecting 700rwhp+ with a few little details fixed up.

Dyno Video

Steven’s S197 – Who says 9 second cars can’t look good too?
Our shop race car is nearing completion. We made the call to step up to a Powerglide to meet our future goals. The fuel system is also being converted to a return style system to meet these future goals as well. The engine was freshened up and the car has undergone some weight reduction. Stay tuned for more here very soon!

Ryan’s Fox – !!!
Ryan’s Fox has been a total rebuild. The car came in severely twisted from its past days as a big nitrous 351 drag car with NO structural reinforcement. Benjy has done an amazing job straightening the car, installing a cage and beefing up the entire car to handle the 4v Cobra motor that is in it. The wiring has been upgraded to a tricky custom wiring harness. This motor will be inhaling air from an S-trim that is laced with a healthy shot of nitrous. The car will have every portion of it modified when it is done… talk about sick!

Wes, Glenda & Darren at the Autocross – Understeer!?
Drag racing is infused in our blood but we also enjoy other automotive disciplines. It keeps us well rounded and mixes things up a bit. My wife and I went out to the CENLA autocross to try our hand at turning corners. We met up with Darren Madaffari, I’ve had the pleasure of tuning his ‘99 GT with a T-trim and a ton of suspension that he races. Wes’s Video. Wes getting slung around in Darren’s car video.

Bookie’s Cammed Dodge Hemi
Don’t hate me blue oval lovers, I love tuning a Dodge, especially one that looks and sounds as good as Bookie’s truck. Thunder Racing spec’d out and installed cams in this truck and allowed me to dial in the truck to get the best driveability and power from it with the cams, induction and exhaust mods.

Wes, Sam & Dat’s Open Track Car
We are building a car at TPS to run on the NPR open track and around the south. This build has been a huge team effort from not only Sam, Dat and I but with an amazing amount of guidance and assistance from Benjy. Our goal with this car is a relatively inexpensive build that does things right.

We started with a motor that had overheated. Swapping the head gaskets and checking the condition of the motor showed that it had seen better days, shoot better YEARS. While the motor is out paint work, weight reduction, chassis stiffening is all being done.

Keith’s S197 – Sounds fast and backs it up
Keith brought in his S197 with boltons, exhaust and Comp Cams. The car made right at 350rwhp and the first visit to the track went 12.7’s More to come…

Grant’s SN95 – 9sec sleeper
Grant has one of my favorite “sleeper” cars. When you see it you think it is a lightly modified car with some racing tires. The exhaust is fairly tame. What you don’t see is the built 4v motor and 3.4 Whipple with Crusher inlet and the 24lb or 30lb pullies that he runs!

On the low boost the car runs mid/high 9’s all day long. On the higher boost pulley it is deep in the 9’s.

Amanda’s S197 – Girls just wanna have fun
Everyone that has seen Amanda’s car cannot believe that it is a chick car. With longtubes and Ford HotRod cams this thing has some great sound. Her latest track visit put the car into the 12s even with 2.0 60fts. Plans are afoot to get the 60ft MUCH lower and put this car DEEP 12s.

Hoyt Automotive S197 – N/A strong, nitrous stronger
The Hoyt automotive car can be seen quite often bracket racing at SCD. With a mailorder tune from TPS they were running naturally aspirated times into the 12s with minor bolt ons and tiny drag radials.

With the addition of a 75 shot the car now consistently runs high 11s!

EL’s New Edge – All business
EL’s car is the epitome of a no nonsense race car. The combo is very basic. A naturally aspirated 5.4L motor with some heads/cams and exhaust made about 330rwhp on the dyno. After tuning the car, EL ran consistent new bests at 11.3.

EL recently added a blower and we will be retuning it and shooting for even quicker ETs.

Matt’s S197 – Get ‘er done!
Matt has your basic bolton GT. Matt also has the driver mod. Congrats on a new best of 12.7!

Bryan’s S197 – Power and MPG
Having all out power is good, but with modern EFI systems and a little work you can have amazing power while still getting great miles per gallon as well. Bryan’s car spun the rollers to just over 410rwhp at 6psi through a Saleen blower. Bryan also drives from the New Orleans area across the state quite often so being able to push the limit on his fuel economy was very important as well. My initial tune netted about 23mpg. With careful testing and observation we were able to improve to a steady 26mpg on the same trips while still keeping his wide open power in tact and walking the fine line between reducing the factory smooth feel and extreme economy.

393 Stroker Carb’d
Ed’s Cobra is an extremely beautiful and packs a TON of power with a Roush 393 stroker underhood. It is a little known fact that we mess with carburetors. Combining our loaded dyno with a barrage of sensors, we can help dial in things to get great driveability and excellent WOT power.

Dyno Video

The end (for now)…
I wish I had time to go through all our customers in the last several weeks but I would be writing forever and not getting anything done! If you want to see what we can do with your vehicle give us a shout!

The TPS blog has been silent lately but in the shop we have been running full tilt. Business has been booming, we are fortunate to have a great set of customers dedicated to making their vehicles perform to perfection at every driving condition.

Let me walk you through just a handful of the cars we’ve been involved with over the last few weeks.

BJ’s S197 – Yeah it’s fast
BJ brought his 2005 S197 Mustang to us with some driveability issues and in need of an automatic swap, some fuel system upgrades and a good once-over on the suspension. Benjy fabbed up a custom 3″ mandrel bent X-pipe exhaust system with magnapacks to help get the air moving. This sucker is LOUD. No muffler video.

The combination BJ has is problematic for some shops to tune with the large 4″ MAF/inlet, an aftermarket throttlebody, cams and hard hitting automatic. We put a great emphasis on making the car drive as close to stock as possible. After all, what good is a beast of a car if it stalls, idles wierd and is otherwise a pain to drive.

With the automatic swapped and fuel system upgraded, we spun the rollers past the 600rwhp mark.

Like any TPS car, dyno numbers are just a precursor to showing what the car and driver have at the track. A day later the shakedown runs for the combo were done at NPR. Track conditions, abundant torque and ET Street radials combined to make for some awesome spin and short shifting off the lines but the car put down a 10.3 @ 137 with a 1.8 60ft. Not bad for the first go at it and from what BJ tells me it is the 2nd fastest recorded time for a KenneBell 2.6H on this particular combo. There is much more left with real tires (where we can use the transbrake and not launch off idle and shortshift to 2nd). This is one sick street car.

Run to 1000′ video

Show Truck – Lightning Powered
This truck was a pleasure to work with. There was not a spot of dirt on the entire thing. The underside of the truck is painted and clearcoated. It is that sick. Powered by a Lightning motor, this sucker has show AND go.

Nitrous Charger – Pumpkins can go fast too
Another good looking Mopar, this one has a 125 shot of the juice and modifications. Great looking color. A custom tune zeroed in on the VE tables and allowed for safe use of the nitrous and maximum power.

Boley’s S197 – Has downforce
Congrats also to David Boley on his 12.4 with his bolton and cammed S197. He managed to pretzel up an unwelded lower control arm relocation bracket on his first pass but Benjy came to the rescue and swapped his control arms back to the stock location at the track to allow him to run his new best. Boley now has brackets that are welded, look for even stouter times!

Beau’s S197 – Turbo power!
If you know Beau then you know he is a nutcase. Beau is one of those guys you love having around because he will keep you in stitches the whole time. We did some basic suspension/rearend work and an initial shakedown tune on about 14psi that made 560rwhp and proved to be quite a handful at the track. Driver mod on order… then more power muhaha.

Gerrard’s F150 – Sleeper truck
I love working with trucks, especially show trucks that look slow but pack a punch. Gerrard had been having drivability and detonation issues so he brought the truck to me to work out all the kinks. We redid the tune and left it on the safe side. His visit at the track last weekend showed a 13.6 ET on his STREET tires. This was much faster than his previous best of 13.9. Wait till he has some traction! This truck moves and looks great doing it.

Jimmy’s Fox – Purpose built
We’ve been working with Jimmy over the last couple weeks getting all those little items in that come up in a new build squared away. We first tried to tune the motor with a Saleen blower that had the smallest pulley I have ever seen. This beast of a motor proved to ingest more air that the poor little blower could provide, netting us about 1psi at WOT.

Fast forward… Jimmy ditched the Saleen blower and stepped it up to a Procharger F1A. This is not any F1A however, it has been modified with a higher step up ratio. Tuning will be happening soon, this car will be ridiculous.

Gabe’s Cobra
Gabe brought us his Cobra to add a pulley that would increase the amount of boost the blower produced. With the pulley comes mods to the fuel system and mass air system to support the added boost. This Cobra is a great example of why the terminator platform is so popular, simple mods create excellent power!

William’s Cobra – Super clean, super fast
William has an extremely clean Cobra. He brought it to us to work through some charging issues he had and work with the tuning in the car. Exhaust mods are planned to help get boost from the KenneBell out of there in a hurry.

Benjy’s S197 Stick to Auto Swap – I can shift it, I really can!
This past weekend Benjy undertook swapping a 5R55S transmission into our 2005 shop turbo car. This car has very basic mods, 3.90 gears, a 9psi turbo kit, aluminum driveshaft. Stock suspension and catalytic converters still remain. With the auto swapped and the car retuned it put down 435rwhp. A track visit is pending for some shakedown runs, stay tuned!

Dev’s Saleen – The Texan with style!
Dev drove in from Dallas to drop off his FINE authentic blown Saleen. He had some belt alignment issues and also some issues with the hood latching properly and finally needing dyno tuning. I emailed him a tune to let him make the trip over to us and work began immediately. Dev had put some very nice touches on his car to make it uniquely his own. This one has been a pleasure to work with.

Emile’s Fox – Super fine fox
Emile picked up a Fox that had undergone a restoration into a show car. The motor had some smoke under throttle so we performed a compression and leakdown test which showed a tired 5.0. We will be pulling the engine, having it freshened up and then dyno tuning it to allow it to have perfect driveability that fits the amazing restoration. While the engine is out we will send off parts to be powdercoated to round out this beautiful car.

Stay tuned for part 2…
I was told everything I had to post was too long so I’ll break it up into a two part post… stay tuned (a pun!) for more of what we have been doing in a week or so.

The much awaited powerglide transmission is in along with the bellhousing and shifter. Work started immediately upon having all necessary parts in hand. We’ve got the interior gutted in preparation for some rewiring and a fresh look inside. The engine bay is looking amazing thanks to Zach’s paint work.

Just a little eye candy this time. Expect 9’s out of this very soon. New transmission just got finished, reassembly pending.

If you’ve been by our shop lately you have noticed that we have way too much going on and way too many parts just sitting around getting in the way.

As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure so we are hosting a swap meet to get rid of our stuff as well as any stuff you might have. Pieces and parts from all makes and models are welcome… bring out what you’ve got.

Don’t miss it, this Saturday, August 15th… 5pm – 9pm at the shop. We’ll have food and drinks there and always a good time!

Hope to see you there!

One of the great things about owning a Mustang is the types of people that you get to meet. We had the pleasure of meeting Tony at State Capitol Dragway this past Saturday. He told us about a new Mustang club that had just gotten started around our area. The focus on this club is to be family friendly and give back to the community. Absolutely a vision we can stand behind.

Glenda and I had the opportunity to make the meet on August 1st. There was a nice gathering of cars and a wide variety of people, not your average group of punks hanging out in a parking lot here!

I highly recommend checking out their website and forums for the next meet. We’ll see you there!

As a tuner, one of the most integral parts of what I do is reviewing and interpreting datalogs. One thing that I find sorely lacking in most DIY tuners’ toolboxes are the tools with which to properly view and quantify the data they have collected. Being able to visually see data helps identify problems such as faulty O2s, slipping supercharger belts and proper fueling and spark advance curves.

Let me walk you through a simple example with my personal car – a supercharged 1995 GT running CBAZA strategy U4P0 base calibration. The combo consists of the stock 150,000 mile longblock, Trickflow heads, S-trim at 15psi and a water methanol kit through a 4R70W automatic transmission. This example finds me dialing in the water/methanol kit with both pre and post blower nozzles. Datalogging software and hardware in this example is Clint Garrity’s BinaryEditor through a Moates Quarterhorse chip.

Before we start go ahead and download a few things to follow along… Dyno Chart, Datalog, SCT’s LiveLink. The calibration used in this example is available on request if you drop me an email – wes@tpsperformance.com.

The first thing to do is get LiveLink installed. Even if you do not have any SCT hardware, you can still use LiveLink to visualize and zoom in on your datalogs as long as they are in a standard CSV format with the column headers in the first row. BinaryEditor saves logs in this format “out of the box”. twEECer’s CalCon datalog files can be saved out as CSV and they will be viewable as well.

I will not give you a step by step instruction on using LiveLink – it is quite intuitive (and also useful if you have a SCT handheld to log ODBII data in realtime). Check the help file under “Toolbar Options” for a quick runthrough of the options.

Once you have LiveLink loaded, go to the “File” menu and select “Open”. Locate the datalog file you downloaded. If you datalog a lot of parameters they may not all fit in the list on the left – you can either trim out some of the columns in Excel or right click the listing and change the font size to something smaller to allow additional room.

With the datalog open, I normally first click on “RPM” to give me a feel for where my pull is. You can clearly see the RPM jump up towards the end of the log – this is the pull on the dyno. A nifty trick to zoom in on a particular portion of a log is to RIGHT CLICK AND HOLD on the start of the section of interest and while holding drag to the end of the section of interest. LiveLink will automatically zoom in on this portion for you.

Go ahead and do the right click and drag zoom on the pull on the dyno. You will get a screen similar to this:

You can check the checkbox next to each parameter you wish to view. A few interesting ones to watch are LOAD, PW1, SPARK, MAFV and ACT.

Running through each of the params mentioned, you see as RPM increases LOAD goes up – this is typical of centrifugal blower cars… the more you spin ‘em the most boost they make. This is verified with the dyno chart. A N/A car will show a LOAD that closely follows the torque curve on the dyno chart as the volumetric efficiency of the vehicle peaks and then decreases. A load in the 180s is roughly correct for the observed boost so that is an excellent indicator this vehicle is calibrated correctly.

PW1 is the pulsewidth of the 60lb injectors – you see that it steadily increases as airflow increases, this is good.

SPARK follows what I am commanding in my calibration, again, this is good.

MAFV shows that I still have some headroom with my peak at about 4.5v on the SCT BA2400 meter.

ACT is an interesting one. Because of my ACT sensor placement, I am not seeing as rapid of a temperature change when the methanol fires (there is very little room for the mixture to evaporate) but you can clearly see that the temperature peaks and then falls. The somewhat erratic AFR (and large difference between AFR on the dyno chart and LAMBSE in the datalog) shows that the meth is indeed spraying and further tuning is needed to dial it in to what I am looking for.

If you click the “Fully Expand Chart” button in the toolbar, you can then turn on HEGO1 and HEGO2 – you’ll see that HEGO1 is cycling as we would expect but HEGO2 is dead. On most cars this would be a problem, in this case I have disabled HEGO2 in the calibration to accommodate a wideband O2 sensor in its spot.

In a nutshell, that is it. Visualizing data is a very important part of what I do as a tuner. By incorporating it into your tuning regimen I have no doubt your tuning and troubleshooting will improve. LiveLink proves to be quite useful in viewing data allowing much quicker access to “pan n’ scan” around than if you were using Excel.

More updates coming soon, here are some sights n’ sounds from the last week or so…

Ezell’s “Terminated” ‘01 Cobra

TJ’s Turbo’d Auto ‘04 GT

Tommye’s Cam’d S197

Wes’s Stock Block at 15.5 PSI

We’ve covered in the past how race gas affects not only your spark advance but also the readings on a wideband and ultimately the calibration in your vehicle. In this article I want to show you an example of this on the dyno and then show you how to calculate the change in fueling if you know the stoich of the fuel you are using.

I get quite a few questions about what each race fuel will do to your calibration and how it will affect things. Before I give you the stoich for various race gas mixtures, I can tell you that generally speaking leaded fuel is going to be closer to pump gas than unleaded race fuel will be. When you start mixing unleaded race gas in your car tuned for pump gas you want to be extremely careful. The amount that you get leaned out might make the difference in a burned piston or not.

Here’s how to figure out what a fuel will do for you. You first must know which fuel you were tuned on. We’ll work these ratios in AFR instead of lambda since that is what most DIY guys are familiar with. For the following examples we’ll assume you were tuned on non-Ethanol fuel at a 14.64:1 stoich.

If you empty your tank of this pump gas and load up some Sunoco 104 (GT Plus Unleaded – I run into this one a lot), what happens to the 11.8:1 AFR you were seeing going down the track? It jumps well into the mid 12s! Our two fuels in question have a 14.64:1 stoich and a 13.7:1 stoich – you can see the 13.7:1 stoich needs much more fuel per air than 14.64. About 7% more (original fuel divided by new fuel OR in this example 14.64 divided by 13.7). You could raise your wide open fueling up about 7% and compensate.

Now what if you’re mixing fuel – this is what happens for most of my customers that make a track visit in their track vehicle. Say you drive in with a quarter tank of 14.64:1 and want to mix in another quarter tank of 13.7:1 fuel. How much fuel should you add to compensate?

This is simple math – you’ve got half of each fuel, so (13.7/2) + (14.64/2) = 14.17. We can then use the formula above of old divided by new to get 14.64/14.17 or a little over 3%.

This isn’t all to the story – different fuels will make optimum power at different mixes, but this should give you a good overall understanding of what is going on.

I generally recommend my customers mix C16 at the track for their race tunes – it raises octane and the brief time you run it at the track will not hose your O2 sensors. C16 is easy to get and because of its close stoich to pump gas you do not have to worry about mixing ratios.

Without further adu, here is the list of stoichometric ratios I have compiled from talking to vendors, various literature on the fuels and other resources.

Pump Gas Non-ethanol: ~14.64:1
Pump Gas E10: ~14.08:1
Turbo Blue Unleaded (100 octane): 13.9:1
Turbo Blue Unleaded Plus (104 octane): 13.7:1
Turbo Blue 110: 14.7:1
Turbo Blue Advantage: 14.9:1
Turbo Blue Extreme: 15.0:1
Sunoco MO2X UL: 14.5:1
Sunoco 260 GTX: 14.4:1
Sunoco 260 GT: 13.9:1
Sunoco 260 GT Plus: 13.7:1
Sunoco Standard: 14.8:1
Sunoco MO2X: 14.5:1
Sunoco HCR Plus: 14.8:1
Sunoco MaxNOS: 14.9:1
Sunoco Supreme Leaded: 14.95:1
Sunoco Maximal Leaded: 15.01:1
VP Street Blaze 100: 14.16:1
VP C10: 14.53:1
VP 110: 15.09:1
VP C16: 14.77:1
VP C12: 15.00:1
VP C23: 14.93:1
VP C44: 12.87:1
VP MS103: 14.26:1
VP MS109: 13.41:1
VP Import: 14.15:1