[Buff Orppington]

Hi, Is it possible to reduce the boost threshold of the turbo? My 2020 is completely stock. The stock engine seems a bit sluggish around town unless i floor it. Appreciate any thoughts.

[omgitsmiketuck]

Depending on your smog laws in your area... Even with a stock setup a tune is a huge performance increase. As to turbo lag you need to open up your intake and exhaust which helps the turbo spool faster.

[omgitsmiketuck]

Also.. people have mixed opinions on them, but I use a Vitesse throttle controller and it definitely makes your car feel more lively. Though they don't add power, they just allow you to control how agressively your throttle responds. I run mine at sp2-sp4 for daily driving. I can't stand the stock throttle feel. Soooo laggy.

[Buff Orppington]

Thanks, it sounds like a throttle controller is the way to go.

[Casimiro]

A downpipe helped us in the beginning to spool the turbo quicker. A cold air Intake just made us enjoy hearing the turbo more. A tune will definitely make your car a joy to drive.

[Davescamaro]

Originally Posted by Casimiro

A downpipe helped us in the beginning to spool the turbo quicker. A cold air Intake just made us enjoy hearing the turbo more. A tune will definitely make your car a joy to drive.

That will help alot. Also adding aftermarket intercooler piping will aide as well with more air volume to the turbo and throttle body.

[95TA - The Beast]

Originally Posted by Davescamaro

That will help alot. Also adding aftermarket intercooler piping will aide as well with more air volume to the turbo and throttle body.

Actually, that is 100% false.

Air is under pressure unless you are not in boost. When in boost is is pressurized and the intercooler piping and throttlebody are no-where near the size it would require to be a restriction.

Aftermarket throttlebodies are worthless. They only change the "feel" of the throttle because the computer thinks it is opening a much smaller throttlebody once you put on a bigger one. You can accomplish the exact same thing with programming the stock throttlebody to open at a higher rate based on the throttle position (ie, the foot pedal in the car, since these are "drive-by-wire" setups, there is no cable going to the throttlebody). Also, it is worth pointing out that the throttlebody is NOT a restriction to top end power on these cars. Not even if you went with the biggest turbo you could find and the most RPMs the engine can handle. The stock throttlebody never becomes a "restriction".

Again, if it was naturally aspirated (non-turbo) you could try to make the argument of a larger throttlebody or intake piping (which is what the intercooler piping is), but if you do the math you will find both are just fine for not only the stock power levels, but well beyond. Once you go pressurized (turbo) the argument for larger piping/throttlebody go away entirely. There are many places you can lookup the calculations for flow through a pipe under pressure to see where the stock throttlebody or intercooling piping becomes a restriction if you care to do the math.

Now, if you want to do the mods, just to do the mods, fine. But a lot of people (especially vendors) love to quote gains... Again, snake oil for those two mods, especially with the stock or near stock turbo (like a Big Wheel or any others that utilize the stock turbo setup with a larger impeller).

Lastly, what is the insanity with what people are charging for the intercooler piping???? Are they gold plated??? For the price they charge, they had better be, since it is INSANE to pay $200+ per pipe for a mandrel bent piece of pipe.

[wookwook]

I have a counter argument. I ran the mishi IC pipes. The hot side is still on the car, the cold side is going with my MW setup which is for sale whenever I get back to getting it boxed up. But I digress. I believe the piping is a player in moving air mass. But that said, I got the Mishi pipes so I could weld a MW injector bung on mostly.

Turbos have a balance of volume and/or pressure curves, or one at the expense of the other. No one here is brainiac enough to know these tables. But that said you are at the very least releiving pressure and increasing volume in the circuit, which will allow the less efficient turbo air curve at the high end work better on the stock turbo and even with a hot turbo. Yes the IC itself will see higher air flow at increased pressure. Change that if you want a huge project. I didn't. Seems to have worked just fine. TB I wouldn't bother. With my Big Wheel/mishi/borla I was pushing high 20s touching 30 psi at times. You don't need a phd to understand it. That turbo pushes a ton of air and pressure at the manifold was still very good with larger piping.

I spent hours up one hours testing all these exact arguments with my own car over the last couple years. My observations are:

IC and Exhaust are important in improving air flow through the engine. Volumetric efficiency equates to HP. The 2.0 runs near 100 percent VE under ideal conditions, read DA is a huge factor with these engines. Your worst DA day post tune, can have you scratching your head with numbers the same as a Great DA day, say -1000 ft on a stock tune. DA is a Huge factor. The tune bump is all you are doing is demanding all available reserve torque at sea level. Is why you can notice a variation in performance on hot humid days. Or why someone loads a tune on a high DA day and compares that to early fall and late summer DA days and is disappointed with an non-FBO otherwise stock car.

The drive by wire aspect is very much all managed in the ECU to the point you could almost say GM engineers also paved the way to allow advanced hobbyists to do their own effective "tuning" buy increasing the torque tables. So on the throttle response you will be happier with a throttle accelerator. It is just a fact. Once you start to tweak the low end RPM torque demand table hence more throttle I found that there was some unwanted bucking. In that the demand curve per RPM in that sweet spot there is a hysteresis, it was noticeably seeking to match the demand table and there was some unwanted hunting to settle disparity. There is a good response with the tune by not trying to force it into that super tight response curve, but the booster pedal chip is was you want to add. It just seems happy with it.

There is a practical limit to how much power increase you can do. Its just physics. All a tuner will likely do is turn the Torque tables up and measure KR and back it off a few degrees. There is a lot of home cooking out there, and there are a few easter eggs. An advanced tune will have VVT mapped for increased peak and high end HP gains. There are a couple of touch ups in the PR tables I found.

There are defeat mechanisms that you cannot get to. One is the decel or rev over run phenomenon and I believe it is a programmed run off to burn the gases in the exhaust to improve emissions. Motorcycle type rev control is unobtainable. That part is baked in.

Everyone should consider MW if you don't have E85. If you have E85, do it. Game changer. There are VT air tables that are able to yet create increases. This same table which works as a calibration table doesn't add power but instead creates a closer remap of the actual air values once you have added tubing and maps the tuning values closer to where they actually are. The same tables if over worked will skew and corrupt your charting.

Once you get in the 400 hp range, there are additional DCFO edits that will work to improve the new dips from torque control during shifts you have now acquired. It gets a little splitting hairs here, you are now really managing the system at a high level. Some of the tables maybe are lying or are now counter intuitive, are just using a different "labels" than provided by HPT and that I sorted with a lot of "study". Its doable, but if your shop hasn't spent 2 afternoons a week for 18 months and cared that much, you won't see this in the commercial offerings.


That's why most cars will never see over 350HP and still be immensely drive-able and also competitive on the strip.

What else.

[95TA - The Beast]

In adding to what wookwook stated, I would agree that a larger intercooler itself is always beneficial. You can get into the whole "efficiency" aspect of speed of flow and all that, but you are talking absolutely fractional gains vs losses. Not enough to actually worry about dealing with.

But, any sort of charge temperature reduction that can be had is ALWAYS an improvement. So, yeah, a bigger more efficient intercooler itself is great, but again, the stock piping is a non-issue for said intercooler.

I am coming form a background of making 1000hp+ on boosted systems with HUGE airflow requirements. I have tested MASSIVE sized throttlebodies against "stock" size on such cars and the only thing throttlebodies on those cars changes was pedal "feel" on/off throttle. On those systems that were drive-by-wire you can tune that any way you want. On a cable-driven old-school system it made a drastic difference at times depending on the type of boost (supercharged vs turbocharged) and the tune itself.

And, yes, when you get into HUGE horsepower being produced, you get gains with exhaust system size changes... Fact of the matter is the system on the LTG stock is MASSIVE for a 2.0l turbo engine. I have produced 1000hp+ through a 3" single mid-pipe exhaust system before. Can you can "more" through a 4" on the same applciation, sure. All depends on the application.

Fact of the matter is a 5-6hp gain (catted, 15hp with no cat) is NOT worth the cost of a downpipe and exhaust system in my book.

[StPeteHyper2.0]

Buff, with all that being said.. I'm gonna add this in.. it appears to me you have a manual 6speed and most these other guys have auto 8speeds. I've noticed the manuals tend to have a bit more laggy feeling than autos. Tho everything above said is good info, my opinion added is about gearing. My manual has benefited the most from swapping to a 3.73 differential. Clutch engagement has never felt smoother and the low end bogging is non existent. Just for reference.. I have zfr6758 turbo and custom fmic. Getting a throttle controller will help if you don't want to spend to much into the car but I'd recommend a real tune and have the peddle sensitivity increased. Final drive gear ratio is easily revised in tuning also. I just want to see more 2.0s with 3.73 diffs ��

[adman98]

Originally Posted by StPeteHyper2.0

Buff, with all that being said.. I'm gonna add this in.. it appears to me you have a manual 6speed and most these other guys have auto 8speeds. I've noticed the manuals tend to have a bit more laggy feeling than autos. Tho everything above said is good info, my opinion added is about gearing. My manual has benefited the most from swapping to a 3.73 differential. Clutch engagement has never felt smoother and the low end bogging is non existent. Just for reference.. I have zfr6758 turbo and custom fmic. Getting a throttle controller will help if you don't want to spend to much into the car but I'd recommend a real tune and have the peddle sensitivity increased. Final drive gear ratio is easily revised in tuning also. I just want to see more 2.0s with 3.73 diffs ��

Did you have to change your rear drive axles? Also where did you find your diff? I'm interested in that.

[StPeteHyper2.0]

Originally Posted by adman98

Did you have to change your rear drive axles? Also where did you find your diff? I'm interested in that.

If you are manual.. you only need to swap the axle flanges over from your stock diff to the SS diff. From what I've heard but not sure if you have an auto, you may need to get manual 2.0 flanges. I've been able to get the SS manual diff on ebay. They are rare and show up about once a month. There is one on ebay right now if you search 2019 Camaro SS 3.73 differential.. it should be available. It's auction, not buy now.

[adman98]

Originally Posted by StPeteHyper2.0

If you are manual.. you only need to swap the axle flanges over from your stock diff to the SS diff. From what I've heard but not sure if you have an auto, you may need to get manual 2.0 flanges. I've been able to get the SS manual diff on ebay. They are rare and show up about once a month. There is one on ebay right now if you search 2019 Camaro SS 3.73 differential.. it should be available. It's auction, not buy now.

I have a manual so I'm good on the flanges. I'll check out ebay. Thank you.

Did you do the install yourself?

[wookwook]

its what typically happens. Driver tune questions morph into mega drag works. Its all good if you keep looking around, read a lot, and sort out what your own goals are. Don't be offended or put off, but you have to pick through things to understand the different levels of what different peoples goals are.

95TA - nothing but respect. Looking at the sbc world I get it. lots of dollars in mechanicals and hoping for the best, mostly, in the C4 world a lot of rehabs and mix and match. Glad I have a great example to drive around. The ones who engineer that target have my total respect its a lot of work and passion to get there.

The ltg is a really great small scale platform to tweak a lot of things for the least cost to get results that are worthy of bragging rights. Definitely.

For the displacement its a lot of fun and your on a very advanced ECU system which really is more about working with logic systems than setting raw events like injector rates and AFR directly. The computer does all the work, thankfully for the built-in WB sensor.

For me I went to the C4 sight unseen, LOL. Its got a loyal following, don't even compare it to undertaking a C3 overhaul. They all look great on the outside but it doesn't take a lot to find out it was a beater. They still look good on the surface. Lucky I got a good one.

Anyways so much for my rant. Hope everyone's project work out well. Peace out.