TL;DR: Both tunes are OEM quality calibrations and work beautifully together. The car is fast and smooth and has way more torque. Wastegate rattle is gone, exhaust valves are always fully open in Sport, soft limiter is gone. The trans tune is so good and the shift points in Sport are so much better than stock that I wish I'd flashed it in the dealer's lot. DS1 flashing process is slick and fast as hell, best I've used. TVS's process is a huge pain in the ass.
A year ago today I bought a new RS3 after driving a manual Mk7.5 R for a couple years and falling in love with the MQB chassis.
At 7k miles I flashed it (using an iPhone) to DS1 Stage 1 91. It's a great tune, gives the car all the low-end torque it's missing and makes it pull harder up top, all with OEM drivability. On other platforms I've had tunes by Dinan, bootmod3, Unitronic, EQT, and would put DS1's flashing process and quality of tune at the top. I reached out to Darin Dichiara for an OTS file that removed the wastegate rattle and fully opened the exhaust valves. Considered editing the tables myself, but the license to register the utility, TunerProRT, costs the same as what Darin charged anyway.
The engine felt great, but the gearbox was now a big step behind. It felt balky, the power attenuated by a lack of clutch clamping pressure, and short-shifting at partial throttle caused big drop-offs in torque, like the car was falling out of boost. For 1500 miles the engine and gearbox being out of sync made it feel that unpleasant tuner car way, faster but qualitatively worse.
Enter TVS. I knew the whole send-and-receive thing would be a pain in the ass, and that it was possible to brick your flasher, but I didn't expect to actually do it!
A few things to note:
-When you do the initial ECU scan, the utility gives an error saying "ECU not recognized"; this is apparently normal, you can still proceed with "Copy Screen Text". I spent some time flashing back to stock and repeating this process needlessly.
-I got my file in 6 business days.
-Even though my car has a DQ500, and even though the file they sent was named DQ500, I needed to select DQ380 from the "Detected ECU Type" drop-down menu. Selecting DQ500 was a fatal mistake. When I got my 2nd flasher back with instructions to select DQ380 (shoutout to Max at Eurocode, who was extremely helpful at every step of this process), the damn thing flashed in 3 minutes.
And it's a revelation. In every mode, in every driving scenario, it's dramatically better. Shifts are fast and firm, never harsh. Partial-throttle acceleration is immensely improved. Revised shift points make S so much more pleasant to use around town. There are up- and downshift arrows in the gear display now. Revs to 7000. Even if the engine tune were stock I'd do the TVS drivability tune in a heartbeat.
The car finally has that aggressiveness and edge I felt it was missing, with better than OEM drivability. DS1 is the state of the art, and TVS are DSG wizards.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by 5CYL_BTLSHIP
Bookmarks