Whipple Tune vs. Aftermarket Tune

[HKusp]

Other than being tuned by Lund, you haven't necessarily been mislead. This PCM is pretty capable of adjusting to changes. @engineermike has some great insights on the tuning with or without cats situation.

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[Angrey]

Not trying to hijack the thread but I'm going catless on my 2021 with an Edelbrock E-Force supercharger and Lund tells me removing the cats doesn't require any change in tune, if anything it's only to turn off the rear O2 sensors which most of them refuse to do now with new EPA laws. I'm going to use O2 extenders which will reduce flow to the sensor and make it think the cats are still there. Have I been mislead or missing something? Thanks.

The tune would be to eliminate the rear 02's. Lund isn't the only game in town. But yeah, you can get away with keeping your same tune and doing defoulers. I've seen a wide range of results posted from defoulers.

 

[turbofiveoh]

I too liked my Whipple tune on two different vehicles (2015 F150, 2018 GT). I had two minor complaints so I got HPT just to lower the idle speed and turn on the gear indicator. At that point I started looking "under the hood" so to speak and saw so much wrong I embarked on a science project to fix it all.

For fuel economy, they certainly left a lot on the table. The high idle speed alone hurts it. Whipple raises the part throttle shift points so when you're cruising at low speeds, it might be at 1800 rpm instead of 1200 like stock. This probably hurts the fuel economy the most. They also drop the part throttle timing vs stock and don't typically run optimal cam angles at cruise, all of which hurts economy more. I've spent a lot of time fixing all that and my fuel economy is excellent now. That said, I really doubt "store bought" tune is going to fix all that. In fact, many aftermarket tunes I've seen had worse cam angles than Whipple.

The Whipple tunes drive ok and make decent power, but if you peek behind the curtain you start seeing all sorts of things you might not like. For instance, and I verified this is the case on the Gen2, they zero'd out the timing vs lambda table. So if it goes lean it will not pull timing like stock/roush/ecoboost. They command WOT at 80% pedal travel but power enrichment doesn't come in until 90%, so between 80 and 90% you're at full boost with 1.0 lambda/no enrichment. WOT PE lambda is set to .82 which is a bit lean on pump gas. Timing does not modulate with high vs low boost so 9 vs 14 psi is the same timing, nor does it modulate with cam timing like stock. Timing does not increase when charge temp is low, etc. The list goes on and on.

The whipple calibration file can be modified by HPT? I had presumed the calibration was locked by whipple. I am mostly happy with the whipple calibration but would like to change a few things, some of which you have mentioned in your post.

 

[engineermike]

The whipple calibration file can be modified by HPT? I had presumed the calibration was locked by whipple.

Both Roush and Whipple can be tuned with pcmtec and hpt. My preference as of late is pcmtec. I own both and have used both programs to mod the tunes.

 

[turbofiveoh]

Thanks for the recommendation.

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