- If you've ever been on car forums,
seen listing for modified cars or shopped for upgrades
for your own car, you've probably seen these words.
Stage one, stage two, should've gone to stage three brother.
But what exactly are these stages of tuning?
Does it mean I'm going to double my horsepower?
Is it completely BS or is there something more to it?
Well, today we're gonna try to figure out what those tuning
stages really are and what they really mean.
So get ready, get on board and let's go "Bumper 2 Bumper"
on tuning.
(bright upbeat music)
Thank you to Omaze for sponsoring today's episode
of "Bumper 2 Bumper".
We've partnered with Omaze once again to give away
this amazing 2018 Dodge Demon and it's even gonna come
with the Demon box.
(wood tapping)
Hey, Hey buddy.
- Stop watching me, it's not done yet.
- Doug, what's going on?
- Well, I heard you like Demons with cool crates so,
I thought what the heck, maybe I'll make one.
Maybe it's a little like, I don't know.
- Well, you know the Demon crate,
it comes with a set of drag slicks.
It's got a bunch of tools, even has an ECU
that lets you run race gas.
So, is yours, does your crate have that?
- Well, since you asked,
I got my pigeon, Steward, my showbird.
I got a little swarth of Nolan's hair,
that he didn't know I got.
I have my envelope full of juice.
- Okay, ew!
Well, maybe Doug, you should head on over
to omaze.com/donut media because they're giving away
this 2018 Dodge Demon with taxes and shipping included.
They're also going to give you $20,000 cash.
- I'm 15 grand into this project already,
that would solve a lot of problems.
- You know what the best part is Doug?
Every donation supports
the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,
same place that saved our buddy James's life.
- Oh, okay.
Oh, Steward, oh, come on Steward.
Oh, you came back. (smooches lips)
Oh, Steward.
- While there's no ISO:9001 standard for stages,
tuning companies have used these parameters to describe
some real differences among modifications.
but there's no standardized bracket
for what makes a modification stage one or stage two.
So are those numbers meaningless?
Well kind of, but not entirely.
Let me explain.
Ever since the debut of the original "Gran Turismo"
video game, the phrase stage when describing tuning
has become common place.
In the game you could upgrade your car
based on a set of stages.
Now, this isn't a history show so I'm not gonna keep talking
about "Gran Turismo" but this type of language basically
didn't exist before that game.
Now shortly after "Gran Turismo" took hold of our common car
psyche, tuning companies started to label all kinds
of performance parts with stage number.
Were these any more informative
than the tuning stages in "Gran Turismo"?
Well, no, not really.
Getting a stage two clutch in the late 90s didn't tell you
how many foot pounds of clamping force it made.
Just that it was probably stronger than the same company's
stage one clutch.
In the beginning, it was basically just a way to market
these parts.
It was a way for a company to differentiate
its range of products by adapting and video game convention
that car enthusiasts were familiar with.
But there was no generally accepted use of the terms
like stage one or stage two and so on.
One company's stage two widget might be less capable
than another company's stage one widget,
you just never knew and you still don't know.
- [Man] Oh man.
- But we are gonna get to that.
Stage numbers gradually evolved into a very rough guide
for categorizing some upgrades based on how extreme
their effects are.
That kind of loose agreement is possible
because of the fundamental tuning principle
that supports all of this stage stuff.
The more extreme modifications effect on air or fuel,
the more it depends on the presence of other mods to work.
Some upgrades like basic bolt-ons, a cold air intake
or larger exhausts, will get called stage one modifications
because in a lot of cases,
these don't depend on other upgrades.
If you just add an exhaust to a car, you likely don't need
an intake to get some advantage from it.
A lot of modern cars already have really well-designed
intakes so, an aftermarket intake might just make
a better sound and not add any power.
But on other cars and intake and exhaust
might work together providing some additional power
when you install both of them.
More extreme upgrades like swapping out fuel injectors
or turbos to deliver more fuel or air to your motor,
they get called stage two.
If you add a lot more fuel and a lot more air to your engine
and you don't change anything else,
the car won't receive any benefit.
It'll actually will perform worse, potentially a lot worse.
The really extreme modifications,
like a super big ol' Honkin turbocharger,
those can be called stage three.
If you add that upgrade and you don't do a bunch
of the other necessary modifications,
the car probably won't even run.
(engine roaring)
Stage three is where you're really starting to hit
the limits of street drivability.
There isn't perfect agreement about which mods
belong in which category and some people will continue
to argue as car guys who love to freaking argue
with each other but nearly everyone can agree
that a Garrett G42 turbo capable of over 1000 horsepower
couldn't possibly be a stage one mod,
whatever a stage one mod is.
(bright upbeat music)
Now up until this point, we've only mentioned
physical modifications you can do to your car
but that's actually only half of the staged upgrades.
The other half and possibly the more important half,
is tuning your car's computer so that these modifications
work harmoniously together.
Hardware, software.
You need the software to make use
of that fancy new hardware.
An ECU tuner is a very specialized sort of programmer
and mega car nerd who builds and installs
a custom table of values or map.
And this map tells the ECU how much fuel to send
to the engine based on the current RPM and load.
That's the amount of work your engine is doing
at any particular time.
Load needs to be based on something the computer can see.
So it's often derived from throttle position
in naturally aspirated cars and intake pressure
for forced induction cars.
And from load, RPM, and the displacement of the motor,
the tuner can calculate how much air is getting
into the engine across the entire rev range.
Which tells them how much fuel should be added
to maximize combustion and therefore power at any point
along that rev range.
The power can be further optimized
using other tables of values.
For example, if a car has electronically
adjustable admission timing, that can be tuned
for each point of load and engine speed to properly make use
of that extra air and fuel we get from our new shiny mods
like a bigger turbo or more free flowing exhaust.
Now that's all relatively modern custom ECU tuning
but way back in the day, around the time of "Gran Turismo",
creating a fuel map wasn't as easy as adjusting
colorful values on your laptop.
ECUs use use chips of a read only memory so,
the fuel map was permanently burned into a chip
and the values couldn't be directly altered.
The tuner had to create a fuel map in binary
with just a bunch of values express as zeros and ones,
so the ECU would tell the fuel injectors to remain open
and then spray just the right amount of fuel.
And they had to do that for every combination of load
and RPM in that table, usually a couple of hundred values.
Then they burn that table onto a custom ROM chip
that would be soldered onto the stock ECU,
replacing the original chip.
This is where the term chipping comes from.
An alternative to that was just replacing
the whole stock ECU with a standalone ECU.
And when you do a full ECU swap, not only do you have
to program the fuel map, but you have to manually add
programming for anything else the ECU has to control.
Even now with graphical interfaces and flashable ECUs,
custom ECU tuning takes a ton of time
and a lot of specialized knowledge and also requires a dyno,
so it's expensive.
Trust me, we spend a lot of time tuning those 350Zs
in "HiLow" and it wasn't cheap or successful.
(bright upbeat music)
So let's set up a hypothetical example.
Imagine I have a car, we're gonna call it
the Donut Jerwagen or Jerwagen or Jerwagen.
The Donut Jerwagen.
- [Man] Jerwagen.
- Jerwagen, the Donut Jerwagen. (laughs)
Now this front engine, rear wheel drive,
completely fictional but who knows, maybe Audi will make it.
I don't know, Audi, you see this video,
you wanna make my car, hit me up.
Now it's a 2.0L turbocharged inline-four
making 200 horsepower and 200 foot pounds of torque.
Now the stock parts are already pretty good
and because it's well-designed like most modern cars,
you start ripping off and replacing other parts,
you're likely to start making the car a whole lot worse.
But Donut engineers, we work really hard to make sure
everything worked as a total system.
That means if you wanna make the Jerwagen better,
you're gonna have to start thinking about parts packages.
And that's exactly what aftermarket tuning companies
are doing when they introduce tuning stages.
And there's one aftermarket tuner known to be the best
for the Jerwagen, Jobes Performance Induction Super System.
Gotta our boy Job on board.
So what's Jobes stage one upgrade for the Jerwagen?
Well simple, you reflash the ECU to change the boost limit
and add a new fuel map to make use of all that extra air
getting pumped into the engine.
Easy as pie and now you got 230 horsepowers
and 250 foot pounds of torque.
So Jobes stage one ECU tune follows the rough standard
for stage one upgrade.
You don't need to do any other modifications to the car
to get a benefit.
So what would be a stage two for the Jerwagen?
Well, we're a bunch of lucky duckies 'cause Jobes develop
a stage two ECU tune and now it comes with a little bit
more complicated recipe.
The ECU tune was written for Jerwagen with a bigger turbo,
bigger fuel pressure regulators and bigger fuel injectors
to get enough fuel to make use of that air.
So let's go ahead and replace those parts
with aftermarket parts that's also developed by a Job.
This freaking guy, he just does it all.
A bigger turbo, more efficient air intake,
higher flowing exhaust and you can't forget
the high capacity squirters and we're ready
to make 300 horsepower and 350 foot pounds of torque
with our stage two tune.
And of course, some folks are just never gonna be satisfied.
And Job knows that, so he makes a stage three tune
for an even bigger turbo but this also requires
a larger fuel pump, bigger intercooler, different camshafts,
stronger valve springs, stronger clutch and he recommends
to reinforce the bottom end of the motor
to handle all that extra force.
That's your crank, connecting rods, your band journals,
your band calves, all that fun stuff.
For stage three tuned to be worth it, we have to beef up
our entire engine.
But now we're making over 500 horsepower
and 550 foot pounds of torque, who are we?
At this point, you should have figured out what's going on
with this stage business.
Each stage is a recipe for performance.
Tuning companies know there are certain cars
like the Jerwagen, that lots of people are modifying
and tuning in similar ways.
Essentially, these individual tuners figured out
that there were some basic recipes for making more power
that just work but as always, the ECU
needs the right program to make it all work together.
We're now making over 500 horsepower
and 550 pound feet of torque.
Audi or whoever, whatever manufacturer,
I'm sure we're just going to get freaking phone calls
and knocks on our door to make this car.
And one last final piece of context to help show you
why stage numbers are somewhat meaningless is by looking
at these two examples of some Supra 2JZ stages
from suprastore.com.
Now Powerhouse Racing, they sell a stage four kit
for the 2J with a turbo, headers, downpipe,
a new air filter, all with the claim that you'll be making
520 rear wheel horsepower.
Or you can get this kit for the same 2J with similar parts
that will make 525 rear wheel horsepower
and it's a stage one kit.
Zack, what the hell?
So what's the takeaway from all this?
Well, if it was me, I would look at each individual
company's stages and then compare them to another company's
and try to get an idea how comparable they are.
Because if you try to compare the two on face value
by just using stage numbers, they're meaningless.
So you gotta do your due diligence.
Look at what parts come on which package
and see how it fits your application.
So there's no need for you to go brag to your friends
that you gotta stage six intake.
We're all just wanting to improve our cars
and have fun driving them.
We don't need this peacock around.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode
of "Bumper 2 Bumper".
We will be back next week for another fire episode.
In the meantime, follow us here at Donut
on Instagram at @donutmedia.
Follow me at @jeremiahburton.
Thank you guys so much for watching, click that like,
click that subscribe, we're gonna just keep pumping out
content in 2021.
We got a lot of good things coming down the pipeline.
So we appreciate you guys sticking with us.
Until next week, bye for now.