We have another Project BMW M4 in the works here at Vivid Racing and this time it is here for our bench flash ECU Tune by VR Tuned. The car was donated to us for testing by Ricky out of Texas. Once the car was shipped here to our Gilbert, AZ facility, we cleaned her up and snapped some photos. Strapped down, we did a baseline dyno run. It is very important to point out our dyno settings and dyno type. This is because of how many differences can lie with other dynos and settings that may confuse people when comparing numbers. At the end of the day, we don’t care if the car made 1000 horsepower or 200 horsepower, we care what the tune adds giving us a good delta to showcase.
Since this car is from Texas, it came to us with a tank of 93 octane, much improved over the Arizona 91 octane. Our dyno is a Mustang All Wheel Drive setup which we bought back in 2005 ( Not important but its 10 years old :)). We chose to run the car in AWD because of the sophisticated traction control, drivetrain computers that these newer cars have. If you run a car like this in RWD only, even with the traction control turned off, you usually get faults because the car sees the front wheels are not moving. We decided to run the car in Sport Mode to keep the tests consistant. This particular M4 is completely stock except a beautifully sounding M Performance axle back exhaust. To setup our test, we calibrate to 3000rpm in 3rd gear and have our Parasitic Multiplier set to 1.00. The reason we chose 3rd gear on 6 or 7speed cars is for safety. 4th gear pulls could have you at 130mph+, and we will pass on that accident if it were to happen! The only time we do a 4th gear pull is on a 8speed or if it is truly detrimental to the results.
So with that being said, our baseline dyno gave us 377awhp and 380ft/lbs of torque. The first run we did the tires actually spun on the dyno so we had one of our big guns sit on the trunk edge for traction. Based on the previous Project M4 we did, the car baselined just the same which shows we have some consistancy in the cars and the dyno. Next up will be the ECU bench flash with a HOW TO remove the ECU and the process to read and write. After we test the ECU we will be showcasing a set of Agency Power catless downpipes on the car. So stay tuned to THIS BLOG POST HERE for updates!
Shop all our current BMW M3 M4 F80/F82 Products Here.
We have finished the ECU tuning and did a great write up of the results here – https://blog.vividracing.com/vividracing-client-cars/bmw-m4-f80-ecu-tuning-and-downpipe-dyno-test-with-video/.
You can also check out the ECU removal instructions here – https://www.vrtuned.com/tuning/bmw-m4-f82-ecu-removal-for-flashing-or-tuning/