Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 5,846teamzr1 Owner - Pays the bills
teamzr1 Owner - Pays the bills Lives in Engine Bay
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 5,846
America
We find it hard to understand why people continue to believe the marketing hypes of vendors who claim to have a ton of customers have to spend their time soaking the forums selling car owners hype and people buying it.
We have seen countless times when doing custom tunes that everytime the car has this product of an ill performing powertrain.
Anyone believing the RAM effect at the nose of the front end needs to look at the C/D, fuel mileage abd drag to know no air would be RAMMING into designs such as the Vararam and in fact if you look at it's design limits airflow
Worse is cheap design slanted for high profit margins and their claims of performance over hyped.
In this example we look at two Corvettes, one has more overall mods and outputs more HP and Torque yet the caprtured engine data from feedback sensors such as the MAF prove this product is not what you want to spend your hard earned money on.
If you look at the results related to airflow between the car with the Vararam and then the other with the Blackwing and our Icebox CAI you see even though the car outputting more performance ( as a CAM where the other does not) is getting less air to the cylinders. Both C5s are in the same weather, city and elevation
37 lbs/min Max ------------------- 41 lbs/min Max 0.770 grams/cylinder ------------ 0.970 grams/cyl 492 CFM air volume ------------- 590 CFM
The Vararam C5 ran average intake air temps 10-15 degrees hotter then what the weather was where the Blackwing/Icebox C5 had average temps that equaled the weathers temp
In this case the Vararam C5 we had tuned 1 month ago. We told the owner what we saw in the OBD collected scanner data as to the performance costs using this product.
Owner contacts us 1 month later that rich DTC error codes suddenly after 1 month tripped.
We had owner do a testrun with a Ease OBD scanner in record mode and email us the recording to analyze. From that data we concluded that the Vararam caused the engine to go -14 % too rich. Owner checks out the Vararam to find what we see is common due to bad design and cheap makeup of their product in that corners of the top and bottom cases do not seal causing the air to devert. As seen with the lower image below to make this car function correctly we had to tune fuel flow in a odd way in that airflow was poor in some engine loads needing less or more fuel through out the engine load and RPM range. Image shows the Blackwing/Icebox C5 and how linear the commanded fuel flow is where the Vararam required odd tuning to correct airflow issues but in no way can solve the poor design that causes the cheap airfilters used to break up or the CAI to be ill fitted and cause unmetered airflow that confuses the PCM and how it adapts to this plus the fact hot dirty air from engine bay gets sucked into the leaks.
Team ZR-1 True Custom Performance Tuning Teamzr1.com