The Pendle Road Drive Report
A dyno pull is full throttle, top to bottom. Real driving isn’t. So Martin drove a VW Transporter T6.1 150 DSG tuned by Pendle Performance on real roads, logged a sample every 0.41 seconds and read the whole drive.
The report · 11 pages
Every page of the real report, exactly as it was written – the summary, the charts and the figures. Read it here, at your own pace.
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Drag a corner to turn, click to read
The drive
Martin drove it himself: town, B-roads, a run up to motorway speed, stop-start traffic, kickdowns and a cold start. Eleven channels – pedal, boost, torque, fuel, air, turbo vanes and lambda –, logged every 0.41 seconds, and every sample read.
The whole drive, second by second. In every burst, boost asked for and boost delivered lie on top of each other, and torque meets its limit cleanly at the top of each pull.
What the report found · 1 of 6
Within about 0.1 bar of the request at part load, with the turbo vanes within 0.6 points of their command on average. At heavy load, lambda on the road sits right on the dyno pull of the same calibration – fuel follows the air, and the road matches the dyno.
What the report found · 2 of 6
Torque builds steadily with your right foot: about 40 Nm for every 10% of pedal at light load, 70 to 90 Nm per 10% from 60%, and the full 480 Nm at the top of the pedal. No dead band, no steps.
What the report found · 3 of 6
Pull away and the torque is there on the first sample after the pedal moves. On every firm press of the pedal the torque rose cleanly – no plateau, no dip, no hesitation – and the torque limit climbed with the boost, so the fuel never runs ahead of the air.
What the report found · 4 of 6
Everyday driving happens at lower rpm and light to half throttle – three quarters of the fuelled time was under 250 Nm. That’s where a calibration is felt most, and where this report measures it.
What the report found · 5 of 6
110 gear changes on the DSG. Hold the pedal down through an upshift and the torque carries straight through – a median 98% of what it was just before the change – while the rpm falls cleanly, with no flare.
What the report found · 6 of 6
The manufacturer’s own cold-start strategy is still there, untouched: it runs at the start of the drive and has finished by the next stop, at 215 seconds. After that, boost, fuel, lambda and torque delivery are the same in the first half of the drive as in the second, within the normal spread of a road drive.
Why it matters
Power that comes in smoothly and pulls straight across the rev range is effortless around town and strong on the open road. With no spikes in delivery, the gearbox, dual mass flywheel, drive shafts and engine mountings are looked after for a long working life.
“It’s not just about the numbers on the dyno. It’s the complete experience of driving the vehicle on the road – the linear delivery of power, the smoothness, the uptake of performance, everything within the safety boundaries of the engine. We don’t overstrain anything. That’s tuning at its very highest level.”
Before and after every tune
Every vehicle we tune – here at Pendle HQ or by an approved Pendle agent – is data logged before and after, and every log is analysed into an in-depth data log report. Full Road Drive Reports on VAG vehicles are coming soon.
Boost asked for against boost delivered, and rail pressure, across the rev range. Real standard log, VW T5 2.0 TDI 102PS.
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