I did try to go over this in the main post, but ill try and satisfy the question better here. To be clear when I got with him, I initially said, I just want him to flow power through gears at wot, I dont want a cut in power. I basically said, xhp without power interruptions.
But thats not what I got, because he cannot build of an existing xhp file, they are locked. So this is a fresh file, all from him. That being said, stuff I never even knew I wanted, he made better. Examples;
Cold map.; I hated how the car held gears too long and shifted rough when cold. Basically making my drive through the neighborhood at 5am unnecessarily loud and my drive out feel much more rough.
He built his own cold map that almost mirrors the hot map, with that, I dont feel like its hanging gears too long and doesnt hit the next gear harder than it needs to when cold.
Partial throttle, normal driving; First off it doesnt rush into 6th gear. Which i hate in every tune i've used(stock, alpina, xhp stage 3), even after screwing with the driving map, I never got the timing right.
While lightly accelerating, if you dont have a loud intake or exhaust, you would be hard pressed to notice the shifts unless staring at the tach. As oppose to stock and xhp, where each shift you get a noticeable bump and minor pause in power up to the next gear.
Accelerate a little harder, say 30% power and it does the same but starts doing its best impression of a cvt. No interruptions in power as it changes gears up and the revs hang a little more in its happy spot rather than falling off as hard. Its my understanding that this is TC tuning. This behavior multiplies with more throttle, honestly feels crazy. Never knew I wanted it to feel this way but im glad it does.
He modifies the torque converter behavior and it multiplies power harder when it needs to and has a looser feel when it needs to. To note, this worked fine without touching the DME tune, we only recently delved into the engine tune side to try and work more out of it. We ran the TCU tune on mhd, rfp and shoup tunes without issue.
Also my transmission stays cooler after more pulls than before, or cruising. Tells me its making less heat in the trans and thats a big postive for me. I could find 200 degrees fairly easily. Now even after multiple pulls, its rare for me to see 180.
The behavior for downshifts is different, i asked him to make it a little more difficult for me to commend a downshift, but that can be tailored to preference, only took 1 revisions for that to be dialed in.
And wide open i've covered but even after everything else, I feel like what you're getting compared to what we are used to is just far and away so much better, its hard for me to keep it to myself. Which is why i wanted to let people know there are options if they want their car to act a little different and pick up some time. So even if some people see no reason to change the way(inlets weren't supposed to make a difference, right?) its currently being done, for those that do, they'll probably start enjoying their car all over again.
I'm sure im missing something, ill edit this when I recall more. Theres been so much its hard to pinpoint everything.
