Evans Performance Academy - Live Tuning

I go by the philosophy that if you want success you need to surround yourself by the best people to help you in the areas you know the least about. Jeff Evans of Evans Tuning is probably one of the best tuners in the country and I've relied on him heavily over the years to help me squeeze good, reliable, usable power from my cars including Bumblestook's ITB setup when she was still in full race car BSP trim. It was no surprise then that when Jeff reached out to me about collaborating and using Bumblestook to film one of his "Live Tuning" videos, I was more than happy to do so.

Evans Performance Academy - 4/8/2019

In 2018 he started a new venture called Evans Performance Academy where he's taken his years of experience tuning thousands of cars to create extremely valuable training videos so you can learn about the concepts of engine tuning and even tune your car yourself all from the comfort of your own home.

Evans Performance Academy - 4/8/2019

Even if you're not a tuner or don't intend to tune your car yourself, these videos are really great for understanding how your cars are tuned so you're better informed about what's going on under the hood. He covers lots of different ECU tuning systems and cars so this is definitely not the case of being a one trick pony. To have a master of his craft share this much information is pretty rare and the staggering growth of his subscribers and offerings is a testament to its value.

Evans Performance Academy - 4/8/2019

If you're interested in this kind of content, I highly recommend you check out his website and sign up. You can preview some shorter snippets of this content on his YouTube channel.

Gratuitous Engine Bay Shot :D

Also, keep an eye out for this episode when it gets released soon if you want to know how to tune your S2000 with the Haltech Pro Plug-in ECU.

Full throttle run on low cam tune - Evans Performance Academy - 4-8-2019

I was hoping to end this post off with a nice dyno graph showing the great power she makes but sadly that's not the case today. As you can see the in the video, the engine sounds fine, pulls smoothly with no stumbling or misfires. However, the dyno graph showed a big power loss. I'm down almost 25hp and about 15 ft-lb of torque. Just to make sure the issue wasn't the new tune, we loaded my original tune and it still showed low power figures though Jeff was able to get torque gains in the low end with the new tune. Since the engine seems to be running fine, Jeff believes something is backing the system up and he suspects my high flow cat has started to fail as he's seen similar behavior on other S2000s where this has happened. We test drove it on the street and it accelerates fine but you can definitely tell the power falls a bit flat on the high cam in VTEC.

I looked back at my previous posts and find the bonehead thing I did last year when we were putting the car back together. Instead of putting in a new high flow cat, I reused an old high flow cat from my other S2000 at the time (http://bumblestook.blogspot.com/2018/01/suspension-brakes-and-exhaust.html). To quote that post "To get back to being street legal, Lupa's old Berk 63mm high flow cat and Mugen Titanium Sports Exhaust was installed"...ugh! We also discovered that my clutch is slipping a bit. I'm not overly concerned about the clutch slip. I was thinking about swapping in an AP2 transmission back in anyway so I'll take that opportunity to replace the clutch. She's still on her original clutch from her BSP days and was installed during the winter of 2013. It survived over 5 years of insane 8000+rpm clutch dumps for ProSolo lauches and a few track days. It only has probably 4000 miles in total on it but those were some pretty harsh miles. It's fine on the street and I think in the lower gears she'll survive running at NYST next month since that's only a medium speed track. I do need to fix this power issue though, because if it is the cat, then if it completely clogs I could hurt the engine.

I wish the narrative was better but such is life. On the bright side I found out I was having an issue in the best place possible, on the dyno, in a nice controlled environment. I'll get this fixed of course but I'm a bit disappointed. I was really hoping all the cars would be done with major mechanical work this weekend but you don't always get what you want.