Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
I had been under the impression that they were going to tune the car on a dyno but when I asked what numbers they got they said they only have an engine dyno so their tuning was done while driving.
As suspected, the power steering reservoir was dry. The coolant and oil levels were fine. After gassing up I headed a mile outside of town where I could run it through the gears. It's always difficult to quantify changes without a dyno or a drag strip. The best I can do is guess based on feel.
The car starts easy and seems to run OK. I know it's heavier than the Barracuda and has less horsepower so I wasn't expecting to be wowed by how it performed. After a few times down the road I think I was actually disappointed. Like I stated earlier, I'm just speculating on performance. The glitches didn't show up like they had before and it ran respectably. When I tried a hard launch before we were able to light the tires up pretty easily when the car was running good. Now it seems lazy. It comes on strong but my impression was that the revs climbed faster before and that it lacked the peak bottom end power we'd had when we'd tuned it ourselves.
Now maybe my expectations were too high and I am being unfairly critical. - After all, I don't have any hard data to compare. I do know that she used to get a little sideways during a hard launch before on the same pavement. Now it's more tame. I realize the FAST system's computer is supposed to 'learn' as you drive it and the performance should improve but they may have de-tuned it a bit. I need to throw a light on it and see where the timing's at. The distributor's locked out so any changes to advance would have been done with the laptop.
Spence said he'll be back here in August and I think he'll be happy with the overall way the car runs now but I suspect he may want us to do some tweaking of our own.
We were in a bind when we took the car in. I doubt we'd have chased down the faulty MAP sensor and O2 relay. So I am glad they found those and fixed them. I'm still on the fence with my opinion of the tune.
