No shops around here want to spend the actual time that is required to tune our cars. Well there aren’t to many Buick shops left anyway. I have known every single one of them. In some occasions, if you have deep pockets then they will try to get your car tuned out or do what ever needs to be done to get the most power out of our cars. Nine out of ten cars will not get that service because we don’t have deep pockets. You really can’t blame the shop for that because they are just too backed up and they have to meet their overhead. I am sorry to say but now days if you want to get your car to run hard for all the goodies you have on it then you have to spend an ample amount of time to achieve that by your self.
In my opinion if you start with a good scan tool like the Power logger, Scan master, T link and even all the latest stand alone systems that are available in the market that is capable of showing/ record all your sensor readings, it’s pretty much easy to either diagnose what is wrong with the car or tune for street or track provided that you have good proven system like a Translator plus or the Mafpro, Fast, Bigstuff or XFI to make the necessary adjustments to get the car where it should be.
Once you get the car in Ball Park, then you would need a dyno or best yet a track to make the adjustments to see if the car actually have gotten faster or making more power. The butt dyno is useless after a certain point. I have people told me I change this and I changed that and the car is much faster yet when we took the car to the dyno or to the track the car actually slowed down.
Every car is different; I have seen cars with very similar combo yet one of them like 22 degrees of timing and other like 20 degrees of timing with pump gas and alky. Some runs harder with less boost and more timing and other more boost and less timing. You have to play around and find the sweep spot on your car then go to the track. I will guaranty that you will be much happier with the results.
Just my $.02
Prasad