Well, this was inevitable. Ever since I bought my first car, back when Fast and Furious wasn’t as mainstream as today, I was infected with the need to squeeze more power out of my car. I was convinced that extra horsepower, performance, and street-cred (that was a thing, I swear) were there to be unlocked. It was hidden away by corporate finance Scrooges trying to save money on mass production. My mission was to turn my car into “what it should have been like from the factory”.
A couple of overnight parts from Japan and a spanner?
As Grandpa Simpson would say: “Back in my day…” things were a little simpler and crude when it came to modifying cars. It was all about sound and aesthetics and had very little to do with performance. But as any teenage boy-racer knows, red brake callipers add 5kW at the wheels and a stereo system with 2 subwoofers, 8 speakers and 2 amplifiers (at least) added no weight to the actual car at all. In fact, it was the smart way of giving your car that “lowered” look that was all-important. You wouldn’t be caught dead with your oversized wheels sitting at the stock ride height.
Your options were almost always linked to a louder exhaust with an accompanying cone air-intake filter if you wanted performance. For those of us willing to brave new technology, Unichip piggyback computers became a thing and promised boat-loads more performance – up to 10hp on a good day. Amazing! Sure, there were seriously fast modified cars back then, but it took some serious engineering knowledge to convert your car to forced induction and it was almost always a story of “I know a mechanic friend who did the conversion for me”. Not all of us were so fortunate – so we had to pretend our fake fender vents made the car faster. Turbos were the holy grail reserved for a select few.
It was simpler back then. More intimate thanks to fewer choices for the average petrolhead. But we all agreed that no amount of shopping list stickers actually made a real difference in how fast your car went between traffic lights. Especially if that car was a naturally aspirated 1.3-litre Opel Corsa, to begin with.
Staged at the lights
Today things are different. Cars featuring forced induction engines are more common than ever thanks to their ability to increase an engine’s efficiency range. The small side effect of a lot more power than their normally aspirated counterparts also wasn’t something to complain about.
What makes forced induction engines (turbos, superchargers) more fun to modify is the ability to unlock a considerable amount of power by simply tweaking the car’s ECU. Thanks to tuning powerhouses such as APR, who are specialists in ECU modification and tuning for a vast number of platforms, it takes mere minutes to upgrade our shop car’s ECU from vanilla to stage 1.
What the heck does “Stage 1” even mean? You may ask. Well, due to the popularity of modifying cars these days, a lot of clever and experienced folks from the community have come up with a semi-official “system” of moving your car through the ranks of performance upgrades. Each stage means your car has the necessary modifications installed to earn its “stage” title.
Stage 1 usually refers to simply upgrading the ECU with a performance map from a tuning house such as APR. Optionally, a performance intake is also installed at this point. The only thing stage 1 ECU maps generally do is request more boost pressure from the car’s stock turbocharger(s) or supercharger.
Stage 2 starts to introduce some hardware. Things like larger/smaller pulleys (for supercharged engines) and larger exhausts with larger, more “open” downpipes are required. At this point, an aftermarket performance cold-air intake is mandatory as well as a new ECU map that takes advantage of the car’s ability to breathe better. Stage 2 is where a car starts to feel substantially different from its stock, former self.
Stage 2+ / Stage 3 separates the rich from the poor men from the boys by incorporating even more physical modifications that typically provide more boost via your turbochargers or supercharger, usually in the form of bigger replacement turbos or different-sized pulleys on your supercharger. At this point, you’re starting to chase power figures that go well beyond the manufacturer’s design, so everything around the engine needs to be upgraded as well. Cooling, stopping power, suspension, etc. This is where the biggest power is made short of swapping the engine completely. But it’s usually prohibitively expensive, even though the fun factor is on par.
You have to start somewhere…
…and for us, that means Stage 1 performance software from APR. We chose our local APR dealer in New Zealand, HSP Tuning, to upgrade our shop SQ5 to APR’s stage 1 file for 93 Octane (98 RON for those in Kiwi country). According to the APR website, pushes the stock power figure of 361hp to 444hp at the crank. That’s an 83hp increase from software alone.
And the verdict…
Meh. There we go. I could have stopped typing two sentences ago. If you look at the advertised power increase figures you wouldn’t expect “meh” to be the sort of response to 83 extra horses. Well, as is most often the case – there’s a catch.
If you look at the APR graph above, you’ll notice that the stock power and torque figures stop measuring at about 6200 rpm. That’s because unlike the B8 S4, which shares the same power plant but with a DSG gearbox, the SQ5 uses a ZF 8HP automatic transmission. Even though the ZF 8HP box has been touted as the best automatic transmission in the world (2018 – cardanddriver.com) it does have a rather abrupt limit in the SQ5, which kicks in at 6200rpm.
“But the APR graph goes well past 6200rpm!” I hear you shouting at the screen. Yes, it does, and therein lies the marketing fluff. In order to get the higher power figures, they had to reach higher RPM values because superchargers make more power the higher the RPM (it’s just how they work). If APR let the car’s stock dyno graph go as far as the stage 1 mapping, the stock values would have been higher, too. But that would have looked bad for marketing.
The problem is that for most folks, the gearbox will change gears when it hits 6200rpm causing them to lose out on the additional ~40hp sitting in the higher rpm band. There is a hack around this (Here) by disabling the upshift via VCDS to allow you to reach higher RPMs in manual mode, but it doesn’t always work. The proper solution is to apply modified mapping to the ZF 8HP box, something APR doesn’t provide – but more on that later.
So in reality, the APR Stage 1 93 Octane file provides closer to 45hp extra at the crank. On a car that already has 361hp, that extra 45hp is barely noticeable. The power you really feel and appreciate when modifying cars comes from low down in the rev range. When the torque comes in faster and lasts longer, that’s when your butt-dyno can confirm the gains. That simply isn’t the case here. The power gained from the stage 1 file on an SQ5 is delivered in the rev range where normal driving simply doesn’t happen.
So, stage 1 isn’t worth it?
On an Audi SQ5, the simple answer is no. However, if you own a 3.0 TFSI Q5 or any other non “S” model Audi that makes use of the same 3.0-litre supercharged V6 engine, I would absolutely recommend getting the Stage 1 93 Octone file from APR. That increase means going from 270hp to 444hp (even ignoring 40hp or so past 6200rpm), and that will definitely blow your mind. As for the “S” models, S4, SQ5, etc. – your money would be better spent on performance tyres and saving up for Stage 2. That is where the real fun begins…