A good customer is letting us use his stock 2018 Golf R for some R&D before we install our turbo and make it into a monster. It has been a long time since I've had my hands on a bone stock R, so I'm taking this opportunity to take the car through the stages and refine my base tunes. The car is completely stock with about 6k miles on it.
First we ran some stock baseline pulls. The blue lines show a median run on the stock tune. We're enjoying some nice cool weather right now, so numbers will look a bit extra healthy in general even though we are using SAE correction.
After getting the baselines out of the way, I proceeded to load our EQT Stage 1 91 Octane base tune. The tune made good power right away, but there was a little boost fluctuation and the curve didn't quite meet my standards. So I spent the better part of a day going through and refining the tune. You can see the result in the green curves. Again, the cold weather is helping a bit here as I never expected this much gain from tuning alone. This map will be the basis for a future base tune revision release, but it may get dialed back a little bit after further hot lap testing and final testing on a handful of vehicles around the country. I expect the final 91 Octane Base Tune to be within 10whp of these runs.
After I was done with the fun stuff, I decided to test the Cobb 91 Octane Stage 1 High Boost OTS tune. You can see the results of that in the magenta lines. This tune seems to run very low boost, peaking around 23psi. It makes some clear gains over stock, but obviously leaves a lot on the table.
Next up, we're going to install some colder spark plugs, downpipe, intake, and intercooler so that I can test and refine our stage 2 Base Tunes.
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