Hey guys, Adam here with americanmuscle.com.
Today, we're taking a closer look at installing and dynoing our Bama Rev-X by SCT 2-custom
tune tuner available for the 2018 Mustang GT with the manual transmission.
Now, if you're the owner of that '18 GT, you might be looking to pick up some horsepower
and torque with an extremely easy to use handheld tuner with two custom tunes perfect for your
specific vehicle.
This option from Bama by SCT gives you a number of different ways to monitor your engine vitals,
a coolant temp, air-intake temp, air-fuel ratio so on and so forth.
So you get to monitor live data on the dashboard on the fly within arm's reach of the driver's
seat.
Now, those two custom tunes we are getting with this so will include the 87-octane tune
or 87 performance, as well as the 93 race for a 93-octane tune.
Now, that'll give you a good option for the street with 87 and 91 but you're also getting
a really good 93-specific tune to pick up the most power that you can make with this
particular tuner.
Now, when it comes to getting this for your own Mustang, you can do so for just about
400 bucks, which again, it's a really common price tag for custom tuners like this one
here.
All right guys, so we strapped down our 2018 Mustang GT to the dyno and we ran our baseline
numbers just to see what it's making from the factory and we came out with 424 horsepower
and 385 foot-pounds of torque.
We then uploaded our 93-race tune, strapped it back down to the dyno, just to see what
our maximum amount of gains we could get.
It looks like, after we strapped it down, we ran the 93 octane and we came out with
12 horsepower and 9 foot-pounds of torque for peak gains.
Now, obviously, those numbers are high single digits, low double digits, but the curve gains
are really what's the impressive feat here.
Now, curve gains, we're looking at 18 horsepower and 25 foot-pounds of torque under the curve.
25 foot-pounds of torque is something you will definitely feel off the line, but low-end
torque is something you're really gonna feel out on the street, especially if you're doing
more street driving.
Now, if you wanna get this installed on your Mustang, one out of three wrenches on our
difficulty meter, 20 to 30 minutes tops if this is the first time you're using this for
your Mustang.
Pairing the device will take a little bit longer but again 30 minutes at the most here.
All right guys, since we're in the car here, I wanna show you guys some of the features
of the Rev-X by SCT tuner from Bama.
We've got this plugged into our OBD-II port, the other ends gonna go right into the top
here and it'll kick on.
All right, as soon as it boots up, you'll go right to the main menu here.
You get a few different options to choose from, program vehicle is pretty straight forward,
that's the menu option you'll go into to actually tune or flash your 2018 Mustang.
I wanna show you guys how this actually gets tuned, so we're gonna go back up to program
vehicle.
We wanna confirm that that's the correct VIN number for your vehicle.
Now it will say Internet is required, you wanna make sure you're connecting to the proper
Wi-Fi, whatever is close to you, you have a really good signal that'll support all your
vehicle files if you're using that from the cloud.
All right, so, over Wi-Fi, it downloads some of those newer files and it'll tell you that
your car is now up to date with the newest files available for your vehicle, you hit
okay, we'll start moving forward.
At this point it will ask you for the cloud sync.
Now you can press continue to sync available files with the cloud.
Since our tune is on the cloud, we're gonna hit continue.
You'll be given a street-use notice, the device is not legal for sale or use in California
on any pollution-controlled motor vehicles.
Press continue to start, you just wanna hit continue to agree to that.
Make sure your ignition key is in the on position, you don't wanna fully start your Mustang just
yet, just make sure it is turned on.
At this point, you'll be given all of the options for the tunes you have on the device.
Now, as you can see, we have a number of different tunes for our 2018 GT.
The one that we're actually using today is this 93 race tune.
At the bottom, we've got 93 octane in the tank, so we wanna see what the most we can
get out of this car is gonna be with this tuner.
Now, when you turn yours on for the first time, you'll have your 87 and your 93, you
won't have all of these options here.
Since we've done a little work to our 18, we've got a bunch of more options.
So what we're gonna do is go into the 93 race tune we've got for today.
And it'll take you to your 0 to 100% loading.
So, in the next section, you'll be given this prompt to let you know that, if you have a
pre-loaded tune on the device, it will be disabled with our custom tune, so we're just
gonna hit confirm, we don't worry about that today.
So, at this point, since this is a new device being paired with our '18 GT, it'll say the
device isn't paired and you wanna hit confirm to pair this device with your Mustang.
Now, again, your custom tune will pop, the one you selected in the beginning of this
option, then you're gonna continue and it will start processing.
Before it actually flashes your Mustang, it's gonna save your stock-tune file to the device
so if you ever wanted to revert back to stock, you could do so right on the device without
having to go back to Ford.
All right, at this point, it'll prompt you to turn your key off, so you'll hit that start/stop
button to turn it off.
You'll be prompted again to turn it back on.
At this point, the program is complete, you've got the 93 race tune installed on your '18
GT and you're good to go.
The gauges and data-logging menu is probably one of the better options in it this particular
device.
That will give you your turn key on, you wanna make sure your ignition has started, we hit
continue.
It'll move along so that you can actually monitor and track a bunch of different engine
vitals on the fly and data log with your tuner in case you wanna make adjustments to it.
So, we're working with the Ford gas, obviously it's newer than an OH so that's the option
we're gonna check, we're gonna hit continue.
It'll load up what we needed to load up, scan the data-log file and then we'll be able to
monitor a bunch of different engine vitals.
As you can see, there's two gauges on here now, the control-module voltage and the coolant
temp.
Now, if I wanted to select one of these, I can check the item and then switch it over
to say an intake air temp.
Hit approve, it'll swap out, so intake air temp and coolant temp.
These are just a couple of options you can actually record and data log.
Now, you can swap those out with a bunch of different options, you can hit item, swap
it down for your RPMs, hit approve, it switches out.
You can switch out a bunch of these different gauge layouts as well, you can monitor up
to six things at once with different gauge layouts, so that's a really good option to
have.
Going back, we're gonna stop data logging, it'll exit out, take us back to the main menu.
Vehicle functions, you can read DTC codes or Diagnostic Trouble Codes.
Anytime your check engine light comes on, not sure what it is you can read that code,
it'll give you the code and the description of it so you can get that taken care of and
then clear the code and get rid of that light.
That's a good feature to have as well.
It'll give you your vehicle info, your VIN number, things of that nature.
Device info, the same way, it'll give you the device name, the device part number and
your serial number which is important when it comes time to actually get tuned updates.
Device settings, you can check for updates, you can connect to Wi-Fi which is a really
cool feature with the Rev-X from SCT.
When you connect to your Wi-Fi, you can then cloud-file sync.
So, essentially, when you get tuned revisions in the future with your free tunes for life-program
that you're in once you purchase this, they'll get tuner visions sent to the cloud from Bama
which eliminates the need of using USB's connected to your computer .You connect to Wi-Fi, you
can download those tune-update revisions from the cloud directly to your device over the
internet via Wi-Fi.
So, that's gonna take you through all those features.
Some of the cool things is just data logging and monitoring your engine vitals on the fly.
If you have a windshield mount, you can mount this in your point of view, monitor those
as you're driving.
All right, that's gonna wrap up my review install and dyno of the Bama Rev-X by SCT
tuner with two custom tunes for the 2018 GT Mustang with a manual transmission.
If you're looking to pick up horsepower and torque gains, especially under the curve at
the low end, this is a really good device to have especially if you're looking to monitor
some live-engine vitals on the fly within arm's reach of that driver's seat, have a
DTC code reader being able to read it and clear it as well as some data logging features,
Wi-Fi capabilities so on and so forth.
Ifou wanna pick this up for your own S550, you can do so right here at americanmuscle.com.