Just gonna be honest here. It's hard to tell. Really...APR felt like a torque monster when it wasn't surging. With the mods in my sig I was breaking traction in third slightly. I basically never thought about stomping on it in 1st or 2nd.
Now with Strat I don't think I've broken traction in third once. Whether or not that's because Strat puts out less power I don't know. It could just be because of how Strat modulates the power, and it's also much easier to modulate the power with the throttle. You stomp on it and it pulls strong, but it's not so crazy that traction is just barely breaking lose throughout the rpms like it would with APR. The weather could also be a factor for that too though, it's 95 degrees now and I haven't been able to run my strat tune in cooler weather yet.
I step on it in 1st and 2nd more than I used to since I can punch it a little more and give it the amount of throttle I want to without having the car go balls to the wall.
These aren't really the best metrics to go by as I really only have my butt dyno and my feelings though.
I'm still peaking at 22-23ish psi and holding good numbers. On top of that I know a little more about what I should be watching for thanks to Strat. My knock retard has the occasional ignition correction up to -0.75 which is still well within line and my long term fuel trims have been between .97-1.03 which is also right where it should be. I still need to change one of my gauges to watch AFR so I can make sure that checks out where it should. It's a good feeling being able to see that the car is running well, and it's an even better feeling when you stomp on it.
So ya, it's kinda hard to tell. I think Strat pulls really good, but the smoothness is what takes above and beyond. You stomp on the gas and its just smooth all the way through, 0 surging or anything like that. When you need the power it's there for you right away, and not a couple seconds later when it's done surging. It's so much better at building and holding boost especially in lower rpms.
My driving habits have actually changed with the new tune. When I had APR I was always giving it a decent amount of throttle when I accelerated, it just felt like it drove better that way to me. If I gave it too much throttle it was definitely gonna surge, and if you didn't give it very much throttle something just felt off. With Strat it doesn't matter, the car just drives like it should no matter how much throttle you're giving it. It drives like a stock car would, but with a lot more power.
Even my shifting got better. I swear APR is so surgey that it was effecting my shifts. It's smoother now, so I don't know how else to explain that one. Maybe that just has to do with the sensitive throttle I mentioned earlier today. I'm sure a lot of you with APR know about this one. You're sitting at a stop sign/light and you start to accelerate but as soon as you just barely touch the throttle the car is trying to take off like you just floored it for a quick second. Now with strat that doesn't happen at all. I can ease into the pedal so much easier, it's actually effortless even though I have a single mass flywheel. I actually thought my flywheel was the thing giving me issues when I had APR.
The overall driving experience is so much better now that I have strat. There's things about my car that I've been frustrated with and I used to think it was a piece of hardware I changed that was causing it, but after getting rid of APR it's pretty clear it was the tune that was giving me so many issues. It's possibly that I've lost some power, but I feel like any power I may have lost is negligible, and then add to the fact that the car is a much better DD than it's been in years and I couldn't be happier.
The entire experience with Strat has just been amazing. Everything just feels so much more personal. They build you a tune based on your mods, then they give you a free MAF calibration and send you a revised tune based on your logs. I paid $50 for extra data log refinement and just got my refined tune last night. I still need to do more driving, but I feel like the new tune is even better than the first one. The emails they send you explain everything, they tell you what to look for and what the numbers should be at. When I got an email with my refined tune they had left me some notes about what they saw on my logs. They basically said everything looked good, it was where it was supposed to be, and the only changes they made to my new tune was they advanced the timing for extra power. I feel like I've actually learned something since I bought my cobb. Instead of just being off on my own hoping everything is running correct I have Stratified working with me telling me everything is good, and I can verify it myself with the cobb AP. I'm happy as hell with their service so far.
There's also the crackles. I've been enjoying them a lot.
I don't really mean to shit all over APR in an APR thread, but that's just how bad my tune felt. I just want people to know the grass is indeed greener on the other side. I was willing to bet $710 on a tune that it would fix my issues and it's a bet I won. If you're happy with APR that's great, but if you've read through all of this and it sounds all too familiar then stop wasting your time and money trying to fix how it runs with APR because it's the tune causing all your issues. I'd never recommend APR to anybody at this point.
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