Hey guys glad to be back on the forums. Been MIA for a while since SEMA last month as I've been swamped with work and wedding planning. Anyway... I've been holding off on doing this detailed review as I've been trying to resolve the tune issues directly with Matt and Bobby from GSR without making it public but doesn't look like they're willing to help me out so I'm just going to lay out my whole experience.
On the morning of Friday September 18th I removed my ecu and personally dropped it off to the GSR location in Anaheim (which has now been bought out by Trinity autosport). I specifically told Bobby that I was going to be getting the stage 2 flash as I am full bolt ons along with the speed limiter removal (speed limiter was never removed as you will see in my pics and video below). He also mentioned to me if I wanted to flash the car for E85 fuel which I agreed to.
Arrived at GSR
Picked the ECU up later that evening and I installed it back on my car. Took it for a spin and the car felt great. Texted Bobby at 10:29pm and told him everything was great and it felt smoother and quicker than stock. The car sounded louder and back fired more than my previous JB4 setup
On Monday September 21st we touched base again and I mentioned to him that I did an E30 mix (E85 and 91 octane pump gas) Told him that everything was running right and the car felt a bit faster with E85. He said we were going to schedule a dyno session so he can monitor the AFR and add more and more E85 to see how the car is reacting to it (it is now December 2nd and that dyno session never happened).
I've driven the car for about 3,000 miles since then and every so often when I do a WOT pull in 2nd, 3rd and 4th gear I get a hick up type of feeling in the car. I called Bobby and told him the issues the car has been having and he recommended I replace the plugs as I've had these current plugs on the car for about 4,000 miles prior to getting the GSR tune installed.. I swapped plugs and the car did idle smoother but the hick up problem at WOT is still there.
On Monday November 16th I finally decided to do a dyno session and see what kind of numbers I was really putting down. I met up with a well known local BMW tuner at Heads Up Performance as he was dynoing some of his customer cars and was also curious to see what I was putting down. Dyno machine being used is a DynoJet 224xLC. Long story short... the car made 231hp and 288tq I told myself WTF??? that is practically stock numbers.
GSR posted a dyno run of their 228i and my hp and tq numbers look no where near that of their stage 2 that they're advertising...
The car was full bolt on at the time of the dyno session. A week before I had installed a full carbon fiber AWE intake.
So now I'm dissapointed at the hp and tq numbers so I told the dyno guys to see if at least the speed limiter had been removed... we found out that had not been done as the car only topped off at 160. I had previously tried passing the 160 mph mark on an open stretch of highway coming back from SEMA but i thought to myself it was driver error and the dyno machine proved it wrong.
Video of one of the dyno pulls (at 34 seconds you can see a little fireball
)
Things only keep getting better... after not being able to get a hold of anyone at GSR, I tried to get the ECU flashed back to stock and well that turned out to not be possible either. The ECU will never be able to be bench flashed again because they put some kind of epoxy to block anyone from physically accessing the pins to boot mode it (I was never aware of this until we opened up the ECU to try to flash it back to stock).
So... overall this is how my GSR experience went. I was never expecting my car to be as fast as it was when I was running the JB4 in past prior to blowing my motor but I was definitely not expecting for my car to be this slow with a stage 2.
There is a lot more I can go into detail about the technical aspects of the actual tune itself but I've said more than enough.