Not too long ago, I wrote a story about a carriage tuned with a supercharger. The blower installation was done properly. Then the owner of the car bolted on to a set of great looking wheels covered in cheap but good looking rubber. On my first test drive, I couldn’t fathom any of the supercharged sweetness. It was the perfect ride to park in the Burger King parking lot on a Friday night. I tried during a drive on Sunday, shook my head that someone put in five figures to get the extra power the right way, with a clean install, then wiped the gains to the point where the engine availability may have overwhelmed the tyres.
This got me thinking about the ways people screw up their quest for horsepower, either at the top by not asking for a clean install and paying for it, or at the back end with additional purchases. like cheap tires or cheap gasoline. So I called three tuners, one focused on GM, one on Mopar, one on Ford, to learn what everyone should know about how to get the best power for their goals and how to make sure they can use all of it. The first interview in this three part series was with Blake Leonard at Top Speed Cincy in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second interview with Brandon Alsept at BA Motorsports in Milford, Ohio. This third and final interview is with Micah Doban at OST Dyno in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, a family business with over 40 years of Mopar experience specializing in Gen III Hemis, but tuning everything from ground-speed cars and drag racers to Jeep car
Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Do people who come to OST in general know what they want?
Probably 80% of the people who come just want more power without a specific ET goal [ET is a kind of bracket handicapped drag racing – ed.].
What’s the best way to start a Mopar tune?
The first thing is what people often overlook, and that is finding a tuner or a shop. People would throw the parts on their cars the Internet said, then go to a tuner to do things differently, and [the tuner is] like ‘No, we don’t like using these injectors, we don’t like these parts.’ You must find someone who is familiar with the parts on your car or the people you plan to install in your car.
So having a goal and then finding a moderator who can help you achieve it is the right way to start.
Correct. And a lot of tuners have their own formula – and when I say tuners, I mean someone that works with cars too. Not someone just tuning in on the Internet, someone who turns the car in, knows what works, knows what doesn’t.
I own a GM product. A cold air intake, header set and exhaust are the starting elements. Is it similar to Mopars?
Those parts won’t add power to the 6.4 engine, they’ll add sound. We can make a tune and you get power from the tune, but the parts themselves, unlike GM, won’t add power to the already super efficient factory stuff.
What should someone know about tuning Mopars specifically?
They are not GM or Ford. We see stores that say ‘Yes, I’m on the GM, I can do it for you’ Chrysler, ‘and they can’t. Especially on newer Chryslers, things get really complicated. In terms of parts, we really didn’t do much on the car, everything worked great from the factory. Most of our cars are still using factory transmissions and differentials, axles and engines, so we push the factory job pretty hard before we need to change it. But there are no oil pump gear problems like Fords. There’s not really an Achilles heel of these engines, which is pretty cool.
When was the Chrysler engine more complicated?
It’s not the motor, but the regulator – the motor and the computer drive, the encoder. Let’s compare one year to another, so we’ll make a 2014 Camaro until a year 2014 The Challenger. Adjusting the Camaro is much easier. You could put a big humming cam on the GM and blower and it would be really easy to adjust. If you do it with Chrysler, especially when you get ahead of 2014, it’s complicated. They don’t like having all these different modifications.
If I have an NA Mopar stock and want 20 to 40 more horses, what should I do first?
If someone has, say, a Scat ’15 Pack, 8-speed automatic, 6.4 bone stock and they want to make some power, the first thing I would ask them is what is your budget ? If someone just wants to add 20 or 30 hp at the wheel, an engine tuner will do the trick. If they want to get close to that 40 mark, we can tell them you have to put some racing fuel in there and we can do a race fuel adjustment. But 40 to 50 is an odd number because it died between a tone and a camshaft. With an cam, you’ll probably get between 60 and 70 hp. But if they want to add 100 hp, or 150, usually the first place we go is a cam pack or a blower, and you just screw the blower bolt and adjust it properly. But people blow them up because they’re so heavily tuned.
Where does the cam start to do it properly?
Depends on whether it’s an automatic or a manual transmission. For those in the know, it turned out to be quite nice for around $4,500. We don’t put cams in automatic transmissions with factory torque converters because they’re not worth it. If you just want an extra 40 hp we can put a soft cam in there, but all of our cams are pretty noisy so we’ll also need a high performance converter . Lots of oranges but sounds great, the car doesn’t run well. They need something to loosen the load at low RPM or at idling, or else you drop it into the drive the cam will try to push through brake or stall. An automatic cam and converter will cost around $6,800.
Do people want too much power for the money they pay?
That happens very often. One of the most important things is to say, ‘I have this budget, what makes sense for the money I have?’ There are a lot of costs that people don’t take into account, even if they’re just making parts. [They’ll say], ‘The turbocharger costs 7,400 USD, I have 8,000 USD, can you install the fan for my car? ” Well, no, because there are supporting parts like motor computer, tuning module, regulator, and there’s an extra $2,500 for parts other than the blower. So they don’t have a budget. suitable for what they are trying to do.
In that case, is it ‘This is what we can do and we can’t negotiate?’
Yes. We pay for parts, and we don’t negotiate with labor. But if someone says, ‘Hey, I want to put a blower on my car for $6,000, can I do that?’ I would say no, but for $6,000 you can do this, this, this, or for four more dollars you can have an air blower in your car. Usually, when someone says ‘I have $4,000, I want 100 hp’, they read on the Internet that for $4,000 they can get a set of cams and make 100 hp. Immediately you say, “I can see this guy has been reading online,” so we try to give him some factual information, not misinformation.
And you can’t just install a turbocharger and not make the accessories?
You can do it but the car won’t run.
How do owners shuffle their NA Mopar tunes?
The worst of all the modifications I’ve seen is the wiring is really bad [for things like] system and nitrogen meter. If I have any advice, fix your wiring before you get to the dyno. Don’t wire and then drive to the dyno and hope it works because it usually doesn’t.
As far as tunes from those who do it themselves go, a lot of engines fail from having too much ignition timing. And if they don’t damage the engine, the steering is very poor. They will put it on the dyno and [tune it for] some high horsepower goes high, but the car can’t start cold or start hot, you put it in Drive and it stops. It’s great, you’ve made high horsepower numbers but you can’t really drive the car.
If they want great power, what do they need?
If we’re talking more than just slamming a blower and making 150 more horsepower, you really need to fit a forged internal engine into the car. The pistons are made to be naturally aspirated, so they can’t take significant cylinder pressure. They’re not as weak as the Internet says, but if you’re after 700 or 800 horsepower, you’ll need such a thing. One hundred and fifty horsepower is probably where we would stop on a factory engine. If you want to go higher than the fuel level for the race, obviously, we’ll let you know you’re at the limit and you better understand you’re at the limit.
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