We learned to ‘tune’ cars the same way as everyone else. Basically, without a clue, made worse by the fact that the industry at large is purposefully misleading and mysterious – a tactic, it turns out, designed to stop you from asking too many questions. Why? Because if you did, you would soon realise that most of the ‘tuners’ out there don’t know anything about ‘tuning’.

Unlike everyone else, though, we intended to get to the bottom of it, so we invested in a dyno to get started. Over the following years, we gathered clues and snippets to become proficient at tuning the most basic Standalone ECUs, the Apexi Power FC. Later evolving into Adaptronic, then Link, Haltek and so on. In and amongst, we cracked the Mazda RX8 factory ECU with Epifans MazdaEdit, our first foray into OEM ECU reflashing.

Later came HP Tuners and then Win0LS, along with the Master interface tools needed to read and write to the latest and most complicated Engine management systems. As we went along, ECU logics changed, evolved and got more complicated, but the fundamentals remained much the same beneath it all. It is on those foundations that we could continue to learn.

On the journey, we realised that the rest of the ‘tuning world’ hadn’t bothered to put in the same groundwork. Big shop after big shop, name after name, we uncovered that frankly, the vast, vast majority of the tuning community were not tuners at all but rather ‘reflash shops’ posing as tuning shops. Technically, they are tuning cars but without the first clue of how. An entire industry blindly reselling predetermined calibration changes and marketing them as ‘custom remaps’. In most cases, these tuners and tuning shops cannot read a dyno graph, let alone a log.

By the time we realised, we had to do something. But how do you stand out in a crowd all claiming to do what you do? How do you show people what you know and get them to listen when the shops you are calling out have been around, in some cases, for decades and are, on the surface, successfully doing what they do?

So, rather than fight it, we decided not to get involved. We got the cameras out and started to let people in, show them what we do and let them see it happening. Rather than worry about what everyone else is doing, show everyone what we are doing and let that do the talking.

It is working. As word gets out and people see and learn, we continue to get busier and busier doing it correctly.

The model is becoming the norm for us now. An individual in a community has had enough of being left in the dark by the shops everyone else uses and try us out, we fix their car, and then they tell everyone. Then, before you know it, we are the go-to shop for another Marque and model.