Originally Posted by
gmtech16450yz
Couple quick thoughts...
We have two cars with almost identical hp and torque, my Sky and my wife's CTS-V wagon. The wagon is a beast. Floor it at any speed and it will slam your head against the headrest. I floored it at 70mph once and knocked my wife's sunglasses off her head and into the back seat!
The Sky is fast, but not like that. It's a 2.0L turbo for heavens sake! I don't care what the throttle is doing, it's still a turbo and it's not gonna hit like a supercharged engine, no matter what the size. Guess which car is faster 60-100? The Sky (mostly because of the weight difference obviously). Drive 10 people in both cars and 9 of them are gonna swear the Caddy would blow the Sky away. It just "feels" like a top fuel dragster.
Another thing to think about and try...
When you're cruising along at 60mph, go from closed throttle to half throttle and take it up to 80mph. Do the same thing except go from closed throttle to full throttle. Look at the elapsed time differences, I'm betting you'll see they're very close. If you're at 2500 or 3000 rpm, the engine in no way needs the throttle full open to make whatever power it's capable of at that particular rpm. I've seen plenty of engines make LESS power or accelerate SLOWER when you go full throttle at low rpm as apposed to going only half throttle and then flooring it once rpm's come up. Pretty smart of those engineers that worked on our Bosch computer and software huh? The throttle "lag" everyone hates is probably doing more GOOD than harm. The guys that put together the stock ECM and programming were no dummies.
Remember, there's a computer controlling all the engine settings like fuel, ign timing, cam timing, etc, etc. Look at your timing tables and you'll see keeping the air loads and throttle positions lower at low rpm's will put you in much better timing cells than if you tell it you've got your foot to the floor.
On the cam timing/mpg thing, the timing tables I put up here over a year ago are not even close to what I use now. (I should take them down but it's kinda funny when I see so called "professional" tuners using those exact tables in their tunes! Those tables are no where near the best settings. lol.) It is possible to have better throttle response AND retain mpg with cam timing changes. Don't be afraid to just try something and see what it does to the mpg. Even if you lose a little mpg's, you might figure it's worth it.