but my understanding and experience is that 03-04 Cobras cars can not be tuned on the fly like our turbo buicks. We can adjust for temperature, humidity, fuel types, etc. Tunning is the ultimate power advantage. .
True and not true. The mustang aftermarket has seen to it that every mustang owner gets boned dry when it comes to tuning. Theyve all made it so hard, that you have to pay for a dyno tune if anythings due for a major change. There are mail order tune chips, like a JMS chip, which I had, where you get 3 or 4 programs on 1 chip, and they usually get it incredibly close, when you actually strap the car to the dyno. JMS has dyno tuned thousands of mustangs, so they have a huge database to refer to. Unfortunately though, when it comes to mail order tunes for blown cars, they dial in the timing to 1 static number...totally locked in. You have people like Danny Sw***** who has built a big rep for tuning stangs. I really dont know why. Every time he tuned a car in a magazine, the cars were way down on power and they "didnt know why"...this happened all the time. A GN specialist around the corner from me..you know who, went to Sw***** to tune his lightning, and he paid over 700 for a chip and an extra 10hp. I paid 530 for my blower dyno tune (cobra), and LOST 22hp! And the mail order tune I had was very safe, so that would be a BS excuse. I know MANY people who have been boned over there big time, and they will say, "well every car is different", or some other bull****, and the people will pay! Shawn Ellis tuned my cobra after that for free,..I was sort of a pawn for socaldiablo...they used me to destroy the competition...and it was ok with me, because it was free, and I walked out of there with an extra 40hp over Swa****'s tune, and my tune was very safe. At Swa****'s, the lightning owner that was on the dyno before me, had just had ported heads and a cam installed, and gained ZERO extra hp. Danny's helper said "its cause you have no extra boost"...thats such BS. Ported heads with same boost should yield alot more power, but for some reason no car ever seems to make more power on that dyno. But people keep going back and paying 500-700 for 2 more hp, or 20 LESS hp. Plus the whole experience over there SUCKED. Total attitude problem around there. Back to the subject at hand, lol...
There is a device in the back of mustang magazines, which is basically their version of the scanmaster for stangs. It shows knock retard and everything. Unfortunately, no one knows how incredibly powerful this scan tool could be for tuning their own cars. Had I never owned a GN, and had the extender/scanmaster combo, I probably never would have known to look for something like this either. Theres 1 company that had ads out in MMFF years ago, where they basically were selling a chip like the extender. Totally tunable. Dont remember the name of it, and it was cheap for a mustang chip. Between this and that scan tool, they had all the power in the world at their hands, to tune everything, but never knew it. The only other options are FAST and then thers the Tweecer, which involves a laptop and a ribbon cable that runs to some box, and then to the computer. You can tune 1000 times more stuff with the tweecer than we can with the extender, but it costs over 500 bucks, and there is so much crap to learn, most people dont bother. The solution is there for the mustang people, but SCT and diablo have seen to it that the user friendly solution isnt known to any mustang owner. They also have convinced everyone that tuning is incredibly hard and its better to leave it up to them..Well if you tune rpm cell by rpm cell by rpm cell like alot of these guys do, which is useless the second the weather changes, it is hard. But if you run a MAF thats calibrated for the injectors you have, then you can run a stock computer with no chip, even on a blown 9 second car. Only reason to have a chip is so you can pull timing, but there are ways around that.