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2019 Golf R Integrated Engineering Stage 2 Review

RudyH

Go Kart Champion
Location
Kitchener, ON
Reported HP/TQ:
425hp; 460ft-tq (on 91 octane)

Issues:
None! Never a check engine light, even under hard acceleration and spirited driving. No inconsistent throttle response or weird noises. So far the tune has been great and I use this as a daily too.

Average Daily Fuel economy:
Stock 7L/100km (~34mpg)
Stage 2 9L/100km (~26mpg)
Need a dyno! Always was skeptical with their advertised numbers - very aggressive compared to the competition.

I also think the average daily would go down...especially with a Stage 2, as it is WAY too much to hit the gas and go!
 

tigeo

Autocross Champion
Need a dyno! Always was skeptical with their advertised numbers - very aggressive compared to the competition.

I also think the average daily would go down...especially with a Stage 2, as it is WAY too much to hit the gas and go!
Or even better, simply a Dragy 1/4 run will give you all the info you need to know if that is correct or not.
 

aloha_from_bradley

Autocross Champion
Location
AZ
As the title states I own a 2019 MK7.5 Golf R MT.

Mods
IE CAI
IE Inlet
IE Muffler Delete
IE HF Catted DP
IE Intercooler
Res Delete
+Few other brake/suspension/stiffness/mount mods

Reported HP/TQ:
425hp; 460ft-tq (on 91 octane)

Issues:
None! Never a check engine light, even under hard acceleration and spirited driving. No inconsistent throttle response or weird noises. So far the tune has been great and I use this as a daily too.

Average Daily Fuel economy:
Stock 7L/100km (~34mpg)
Stage 2 9L/100km (~26mpg)

Integrated Engineering customer support was VERY quick to respond (within a few hours usually), thorough and professional. I had sent a video in asking about the flutter. No issues otherwise.

Verdict:
Great tune by IE, would recommend.
This is great info. Thanks for providing.

If you would have seen the reaction I got when asking for info on IE a few months ago, you would have thought twice about starting this thread :)

Glad things are working out for you. Since my original ask about IE, I've met quite a few people that have their tunes. They all love them. Couple GLIs and a GTI. The fact that they sell a cable you can actually use to flash and data log yourself without needing a Cobb tuner or taking the car to a "performance" shop is pretty cool. You then have the freedom to remove the tune whenever you want as well.

Cheers
 

ZuMBLe

Autocross Champion
Location
NY
Car(s)
Alltrack 6MT
This is great info. Thanks for providing.

If you would have seen the reaction I got when asking for info on IE a few months ago, you would have thought twice about starting this thread :)

Glad things are working out for you. Since my original ask about IE, I've met quite a few people that have their tunes. They all love them. Couple GLIs and a GTI. The fact that they sell a cable you can actually use to flash and data log yourself without needing a Cobb tuner or taking the car to a "performance" shop is pretty cool. You then have the freedom to remove the tune whenever you want as well.

Cheers
You can sell an Cobb accessport, flash at home and log with it also. With Cobb it looks like you can get a CARB approved tune also. APR is also selling CARB approved tunes.
 

aloha_from_bradley

Autocross Champion
Location
AZ
You can sell an Cobb accessport, flash at home and log with it also. With Cobb it looks like you can get a CARB approved tune also. APR is also selling CARB approved tunes.

I've tuned a car or two. I've also had an AP. I understand how they work.

My point is you don't have to spend $600 on a Cobb tuner to install the tune, nor do you have to bring the car to a shop.

Just makes things easier. UM, APR, UNI, all recommend you take your car to an authorized performance shop to have their tunes installed and logged. I don't even think APR sells their Cheetah cable directly, you have to buy it 3rd party.

I like simple and easy. Seems like IE fits in that lane.
 

ZuMBLe

Autocross Champion
Location
NY
Car(s)
Alltrack 6MT
I've tuned a car or two. I've also had an AP. I understand how they work.

My point is you don't have to spend $600 on a Cobb tuner to install the tune, nor do you have to bring the car to a shop.

Just makes things easier. UM, APR, UNI, all recommend you take your car to an authorized performance shop to have their tunes installed and logged. I don't even think APR sells their Cheetah cable directly, you have to buy it 3rd party.

I like simple and easy. Seems like IE fits in that lane.
With Cobb you pay for a useful piece of hardware and their library of tunes free. With IE you get a much less useful cable and you license their tune? I just don't get the positive of IE vs Cobb. You can absolutely flash at home with Uni. Let's just keep the facts straight.
 

ShagginGSW

Go Kart Newbie
Location
MD
I know for a fact UM doesn't have you log after the canned tune is installed. I wish that was possible but their end user cable just adjusts octane and boost, pretty useless actually on the 1.8.
 

scrllock

Autocross Champion
Location
MI
I know for a fact UM doesn't have you log after the canned tune is installed. I wish that was possible but their end user cable just adjusts octane and boost, pretty useless actually on the 1.8.
UM doesn't really do "canned" tunes afaik. It's certainly possible to have them log your car when a tune is installed, even if for some reason you wanted zero revisions to their base map. The cable and app are the same as what the dealers get, they just lock down your license to the octane/boost screen.


As for IE, they're hot garbage when it comes to tuning. 6 degrees of knock reduction on a stage 1 tune? Yiiiiikes. They make some nice CF stuff and have excellent marketing (just cause they gave hoonigan an RS3 and had them put it on an extremely generous dyno does not mean they're da best eva).

Cobb you at least can get a custom tune with excellent logging capabilities in a super convenient form factor. I'm on UM and that's by far the biggest thing I miss (besides the convenience of no dealer BS).
 

aloha_from_bradley

Autocross Champion
Location
AZ
With Cobb you pay for a useful piece of hardware and their library of tunes free. With IE you get a much less useful cable and you license their tune? I just don't get the positive of IE vs Cobb. You can absolutely flash at home with Uni. Let's just keep the facts straight.

Again, I've owned, tuned and logged with an AP before. Let's face it, their included tunes are garbage. I'd rather run stock maps.

While an AP is a useful piece of hardware, it's overpriced and typically reserved for those who want to custom tune. Buying an AP to go stage 1 makes no sense unless you just HAVE to have a specific tuner that only uses Cobb. Also, the AP is vin locked, which is essentially the same thing as licensing, though you obviously open the door to other tuners.

You can flash any tune at home, technically. But all of these companies "recommend" you take the car into an authorized dealer. That along with a couple logs to make sure things are straight. AZ, for example, has terrible fuel. Our 91 is close the 89 equivalent. Tuning Gruppe in Phoenix actually calls their base map file "crap AZ gas" for their UM tunes.
 

ZuMBLe

Autocross Champion
Location
NY
Car(s)
Alltrack 6MT
Again, I've owned, tuned and logged with an AP before. Let's face it, their included tunes are garbage. I'd rather run stock maps.

While an AP is a useful piece of hardware, it's overpriced and typically reserved for those who want to custom tune. Buying an AP to go stage 1 makes no sense unless you just HAVE to have a specific tuner that only uses Cobb. Also, the AP is vin locked, which is essentially the same thing as licensing, though you obviously open the door to other tuners.

You can flash any tune at home, technically. But all of these companies "recommend" you take the car into an authorized dealer. That along with a couple logs to make sure things are straight. AZ, for example, has terrible fuel. Our 91 is close the 89 equivalent. Tuning Gruppe in Phoenix actually calls their base map file "crap AZ gas" for their UM tunes.
Am I missing something here? An IE tune with cable is as much as an AP and a OTS tune from Sneeky. Or close to it... Now if we're talking about IE exclusive features like altitude compensation, I can understand going with IE.
 

aloha_from_bradley

Autocross Champion
Location
AZ
Am I missing something here? An IE tune with cable is as much as an AP and a OTS tune from Sneeky. Or close to it... Now if we're talking about IE exclusive features like altitude compensation, I can understand going with IE.

I guess my point is there isn't a single route that is right for everyone. It seems that once someone is tuned by a specific company that's all they know / care about and everything else sucks from that point on. I've also heard a lot of tunes being bashed with little evidence to back it up. Mostly someone they don't like working for them etc. You mentioned earlier that IE's stage 1 tune pulls 6 degrees of timing. That can happen with any tune. Mostly depends on fuel quality. You can tune for any fuel as well, so any decent tuner should be able to compensate for excessive knock. You have to look at each of those cases individually, not necessarily the company as a whole. Some tunes are very reactive and pull lots of timing similar to an OEM calibration to protect the engine. So a small knock event may result in more timing being pulled than with some other more aggressive tunes.

I was at a meet last week and the topic of tuning came up. Somehow we started talking about APR and this dude in the group wouldn't shut up about how bad their tunes were and how many cars have literally exploded because of them. I guess I'm just not partial to any particular tuner, but have been looking pretty heavily into UM lately. That's likely the direction I'll be going if I decide to pull the trigger. With 4 years & 50k more warranty to go, it's a hard decision to make.

You are correct, though. An AP with a custom tune is always the best route to take. Some just don't want the added cost of the AP or the learning curve. I also like to see other people having success with other tuning methods.
 

ZuMBLe

Autocross Champion
Location
NY
Car(s)
Alltrack 6MT
I guess my point is there isn't a single route that is right for everyone. It seems that once someone is tuned by a specific company that's all they know / care about and everything else sucks from that point on. I've also heard a lot of tunes being bashed with little evidence to back it up. Mostly someone they don't like working for them etc. You mentioned earlier that IE's stage 1 tune pulls 6 degrees of timing. That can happen with any tune. Mostly depends on fuel quality. You can tune for any fuel as well, so any decent tuner should be able to compensate for excessive knock. You have to look at each of those cases individually, not necessarily the company as a whole. Some tunes are very reactive and pull lots of timing similar to an OEM calibration to protect the engine. So a small knock event may result in more timing being pulled than with some other more aggressive tunes.

I was at a meet last week and the topic of tuning came up. Somehow we started talking about APR and this dude in the group wouldn't shut up about how bad their tunes were and how many cars have literally exploded because of them. I guess I'm just not partial to any particular tuner, but have been looking pretty heavily into UM lately. That's likely the direction I'll be going if I decide to pull the trigger. With 4 years & 50k more warranty to go, it's a hard decision to make.

You are correct, though. An AP with a custom tune is always the best route to take. Some just don't want the added cost of the AP or the learning curve. I also like to see other people having success with other tuning methods.

The bad tune I saw was on NYS 93 octane, which isnt terrible. He even tried multiple gas stations. He reported it to IE and they had no solution. IE just isn't in the business of custom tunes or even custom troubleshooting. They chose to refund his money instead. Same car is now on Cobb and EQT OTS without the problems he had on IE.

APR on the MK7s seem pretty solid. I ran APR tunes for quite a while and logged them relatively extensively. Nothing in the logs was troubling.

Regarding knock reaction and number of events. The ecu can be tuned to pull an amount of degrees out for each event. One -3 is not troubling. It's when it goes -2, -3.5, -5, -6 consecutively, you have a problem. What's happening is it's seeing consecutive knock events. In the above example you reached -6 degrees from 4 consecutive knock events where the prior correction did not fix the problem. That's what was happening with the IE tune. No OTS tune should exhibit this behavior.
 
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aloha_from_bradley

Autocross Champion
Location
AZ
The bad tune I saw was on NYS 93 octane, which it's terrible. He even tried multiple gas stations. He reported it to IE and they had no solution. IE just isn't in the business of custom tunes or even custom troubleshooting. They chose to refund his money instead. Same car is now on Cobb and EQT OTS without the problems he had on IE.

APR on the MK7s seem pretty solid. I ran APR tunes for quite a while and logged them relatively extensively. Nothing in the logs was troubling.

Regarding knock reaction and number of events. The ecu can be tuned to pull an amount of degrees out for each event. One -3 is not troubling. It's when it goes -2, -3.5, -5, -6 consecutively, you have a problem. What's happening is it's seeing consecutive knock events. In the above example you reached -6 degrees from 4 consecutive knock events where the prior correction did not fix the problem. That's what was happening with the IE tune. No OTS tune should exhibit this behavior.

Yeah, I hear you. I also didn't know that about IE. Good info.
 

gixxerfool

Autocross Champion
Location
New Jersey
Car(s)
2016 Golf R
This is great info. Thanks for providing.

If you would have seen the reaction I got when asking for info on IE a few months ago, you would have thought twice about starting this thread :)

Glad things are working out for you. Since my original ask about IE, I've met quite a few people that have their tunes. They all love them. Couple GLIs and a GTI. The fact that they sell a cable you can actually use to flash and data log yourself without needing a Cobb tuner or taking the car to a "performance" shop is pretty cool. You then have the freedom to remove the tune whenever you want as well.

Cheers
I was going to tag you in this thread. Lol
 
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