VW Golf 1.4 TSI Remap, Setup and Results

We had a lovely VW Golf 1.4 TSI in for a flash map on Saturday. This car belongs to a friend of ours who was very curious to see what performance gain he could get form the standard car with just a remap.

VW Claim the car has 124 bhp and 148 lbs/ft of torque from new. However, we know that most Volkswagen cars are quite understated. We did a dyno run before the flash/remap and this is the result:

The car made 134 bhp and 172 lbs/ft torque; quite a bit over its standard figure. This is on a stock car with just a new back box for the exhaust and 70,000 miles, so VW seem to advertise lower power figures than the cars actually make.

Once we confirmed the original power figures we then did the flash remap. This turned out to be a bit of a headache due to the car having a slightly upset battery! But we got the flash done in the end; here's the result:

After the map the car made 159 bhp and a massive 202 lbs/ft! That is a huge increase - nearly 30 bhp and exactly 30 lbs/ft of torque but, perhaps more importantly, the graph is a lot smoother:

The "top" lines are the remapped car and the "bottom" lines are the car pre-remap. As you can see the red torque curve is a lot smoother with the remap. You can also see the power figure (blue line) is smoother, but also that the car keeps pulling out to much higher RPM.

At GBE we give you the before and after figures of your car. This makes the power gains look less impressive than they actually are, but we believe in honesty being the best policy. In this Golf case, we could have said the car makes 124 bhp and 148 lbs/ft because that's what VW say. The customer would then have been blown away with 159 bhp and 202 lbs-ft. But that would have been dishonest and we believe that is not right. This is just another example of the trust we try to build with our customers.

For those interested here is the video of the car: