Porsche Panamera 4.8l V8 - 520hp stock, lovely car to have on the dyno today to see what I could do to tune her up and pull some extra horses out!

This car has the SDI8 ecu which is easily flashable via the OBD port using Flashtecs CMD tool, use to be abit of a messy ECU with lots of failures during communication, even this car had been to a few places and suffered the same fate.

Luckily I didnt have this issue, and was able to just get on with the tuning itself, first dyno run made an easy 514hp and 709nm, so she was pretty healthy. Hooked up with c4l1brate-logger i was able to datalog the car to make sure all the sensor are working and everything is as it should be, no timing pull, no strange boost anomalies which can cause us any issues during tuning. 

The ECU itself is pretty easy to work with, targets torque to work out MAF (cylinder filling)  to create the boost target, pretty much the same as most Siemens ECUs.

Being the PDK variant, its always best to scale everything properly, if you start offsetting the torque to allow more power without the gearbox intervention then you will start knocking the timing tables etc out of sync, it all pretty much relies on the cylinder filling values which reflect MAF so you knock the calculation out and you will start running into mis calculated MAF values and lower timing, which in turn will lower the power available. 

Basically if you run into torque intervention caused by the PDK, then just tune the PDK to suit and make it all so much nicer to drive, if you get the balance correct between the 2 on any DSG/Triptronic/PDK box then they feel 1000x better then trying to fudge around it. 

First run on the base tune (targeting a known torque/MAF value - fuel tables set a little rich for safety and either stock or reduced timing) she ran a nice and smooth 570hp and 800nm of torque, so already up there, only issue was the intake temps was at 64deg (maha has a heavy loaded run) so there wasnt going to be much more improvement via raising the boost, but with the smooth timing maps, I proceeded to add upto 3 deg at the top (smoothed out across the rpm range) and pulled a little fuel out to make a still smooth 584hp and 846nm, so another chunk added still keeping the car just over the 60deg on the intake temps. 

After flashing the ECU on these you do get left with a few random comms codes in other modules, and 2 codes in the PDK for the dyno so cleared these out at the end of the session and gave the customer the car back. 

Very successful tuning session, car is happy where she is and nothing is strained and all this in fairly high temps (dyno room sat idle at 24deg). 

Until the next one!