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Re: Chipping my A-4 1.8t
Hey guys I have a few questions about chipping my A-4 1.8t...
1) what company should I order from?
2) can I do this and not tell my service center and get away with it?
3) if I chip it and get a new K&N air filter, what might my 0-60 be
(right now I have a 1.8t tiprtronic, fwd, so its around 9, thats
horribly high)
oh and one correction, I live in Hollywood, Florida, not california...
One [Grrr!...of the few] advantages of having your company pack up and
move to a different office building...one tends to clean up and dis-
cover "lost" stuff (Oh, so that's where that Hoagie went... [It
actually happened, although not to me!]). So here are those numbers I
promised to post lo these many moons ago.
Here are the actual, measured, times for my '98 A4 1.8T before and
after installing the Wetterauer chip. Times were about "a coupla"
hours apart (so if anything, the Wett times should suffer from being
later in the day, with hotter air temps, but it was a cool, damp day
so I don't think it mattered); all on the same stretch of road,
as near identical conditions as I could practically arrange, for
driving the car on normal roads...
Times are averaged over several runs (total/#runs): (obviously, my
stopwatch is not accurate to hundredths of a second, and even if it
was, my eyeballing the speedo/tach isn't; ".33" seconds is "1/3" of
a second, as in the remainder of dividing 34 seconds total elapsed
time across 3 runs, for an average of "11.33" seconds). Where I did
4 runs was because I felt vaguely uneasy about one of the runs, so
I did another one to see if it mattered, or maybe just for the hell
of it.
Stock Wetterauer
Times Times
4th gear, 40-80mph 15.00 (45/3) 12.50 (25/2)
5th gear, 50-70mph 11.33 (34/3) 8.00 (24/3)
5th gear, 60-80mph 10.24 (41/4) 8.10 (32.4/4)
3rd gear, 2000-5000rpm 10.20 (40.8/4) 8.00 (24/3)
I didn't do any 0-60 times, as they're too hard to reproduce reliably
(for what abuse I'm willing to repeatedly foist on *MY* clutch); the
times above all are easy to reproduce -- maintain steady speed, at the
same point on the highway stand on it, no "pre-spooling" of the turbo
(so worst case times), no shifts to miss-manage, etc. Generally, each
run was within a tenth or two (so it might be 14.9, 14.9, 15.2 == 45
seconds for 3 runs), so I believe the numbers are not only quite
accurate (given the basic technology: i.e., "me") but completely
representative of the RealWorld(tm) results *anyone* else should see.
I hafta wonder what the folks on the side of the road thought
about this white A4 zipping back and forth a coupla dozen times...
Subjectively, the car "comes on" nicely, and maintains a very solid
improvement all through the mid-range. By the time the engine hits
5000rpm (or so), it's starting to lose its edge -- by which I mean at
2000rpm or 3000rpm or 4000rpm you can immediately feel the big
improvement in power; by 5000rpm it's so-so; by 6000rpm any power-gain
seems to be moot -- the engine seems to have pretty much shot its, er,
given all it has to give. Now this is just what *I* want, 'cuz I drive
my A4 in real-world traffic and not on the track (just wait 'till I
get my S4...drool...sigh...), and *mid-range* is exactly where I want
the power, and exactly where the Wett chip seems to deliver it.
This is all box-stock factory Audi: no aftermarket/fancy/racing/etc.
{air-cleaner|cams|exhaust|turbo|valves|etc.}
The only downside I've seen to the Wett chip is a tendency for
knocking/pinging at full boost (although you have to roll down the
windows to hear it echo off of Jersy Barriers, etc. -- it's not
really noticeable inside with the windows rolled up, but it is
there).
Is the {TAP|Neuspeed|MTM|whomever} chip better? Dunno. I can whole-
heartedly recommend the Wett chip. (One of the things I really like
about it is that their ECU mods give you a pseudo-socketed part, so
you can trivially swap stock chip for Wett chip and back again.)
FWIW, YMMV, Caveat Emptor, etc. and so forth.
-RDH