I thought that those of you with tunes would be interested in reading this article. Just think what Team Ford is doing for you @ $900.00 a pop. Pity the unknowing public.

ATLANTA CAR NEWS
Customized tune-ups could help gas mileage

By RICK MINTER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/26/08
It's been proven over the years that when answers are needed to automotive issues, the best place to start is with a bunch of racers.



With gasoline prices at $4 per gallon, motorists everywhere are looking for better mileage, and that's become the focus of many in the motor sports community. The Braselton-based American Le Mans Series recently announced its Green Challenge, a race within the race that rewards teams for fuel economy.
Leavy Morgan II, a part-time sports car racer whose day job is as performance vehicle engineer at Team Ford of Marietta, hopes to soon be participating in the Green Challenge on the race track, but he's already making great gas mileage gains with his own street car.
Morgan, at the urging of his wife, has been working more than a year on improving the mileage on his high-performance Mustang GT. Using his engineering training – both from Georgia Tech and from Ford Motor Co. – and the equipment at Team Ford, he's now averaging just over 25 miles per gallon while still enjoying the horsepower his car is known for. That's about 10 mpg more than the car generally gets.
A good bit of Morgan's exceptional mileage can be attributed to his driving habits — he obeys the speed limit and doesn't drive aggressively — but a significant amount is related to the way the car's been tuned.
One of the key tools he's using is a chassis dynamometer, a machine used mostly by top-level race teams such as those in NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series. The Marietta dealership has one of the $35,000 devices because a former general manager bought it to tune the stock cars he raced on weekends.
A chassis dyno has rollers that are placed under the rear wheels of a strapped-down car. Sensors gather data and transmit it to a nearby computer. Most of the time, a chassis dyno is used in an effort to wring more power from a car. With Morgan's research, the machine is used as much to make sure the car isn't losing power as it's tuned for better mileage.
"The fuel injection system runs on a computer program, and with a chassis dyno you can tune that program in real time," he said.
Modifications to Morgan's own car included a reprogramming of the fuel injection system and the power train module. A larger throttle body was added, and the rear gear ratio was changed from 3.31 to 3.73, a swap that one might expect to lower mileage but one that actually improved it.
"We spent two days on dyno and optimized the tune of the car," Morgan said. "It's a beautiful thing to drive a very nice convertible, drive the speed limit and get 25 miles per gallon."
Morgan said he hopes to begin offering similar tunes for owners of gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups within the next two months.
"The transmissions are different and the uses are different, but we should be able to get a significant improvement," he said. "We're looking for 10 percent minimum, but we won't know until we start."
Cost for the tunes is expected to start at $900.
Fred Villa, service director at Team Ford, has a racing background, too, having raced drag cars at one time. He shares Morgan's enthusiasm for helping customers get better gas mileage.
"Right now, what we're doing is not highly publicized," Villa said. "It's like research and development on each car. We're still developing tunes. We have six or seven models getting good mileage, and we're expanding our database into the other lines we have."
Villa said each type of car has its own characteristics and will require different changes to optimize mileage.
"Each one is like an individual footprint," he said. "Once we get that particular one diagnosed and fixed, we have a tune for someone else with that same footprint."
Ryan Regnier works for one of the greatest racers of them all, NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick. But at the dealership where he's the general manager, Rick Hendrick Chevrolet in Duluth, they're working on mileage improvement for their customers without the high performance tools used at Hendrick's race shop in North Carolina.
"We focus on the fundamentals," Regnier said, explaining that the basics like proper tire inflation and keeping air filters and fuel injectors clean can affect mileage from 15 to 20 percent.
Another area he's focusing on is brakes. "When brakes get worn, they can drag and affect fuel mileage," Regnier said.
All the experts agree that one of the cheapest fixes for fuel mileage is by laying off the jackrabbit starts and heavy braking stops.
"In city driving, you can see up to a 35 percent difference in mileage just by your driving," Regnier said.
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