So let me get this straight... You load the "PERFORMANCE" tune then drive to work like an old lady... Bitch about the shifting... Then dog out the tuner on a public forum...
Kindly... Do us all a favor and load another tune or just put it back to stock and keep doing laps at the mall parking lot so you can snag that front spot!
Temptation to respond directly to this individual reluctantly resisted.
The first question I would have is this. With your limited daily driving, did you happen to allow for time for the truck to "re-learn" the tuning before going for wide open throttle acceleration? If you do not do that, then the truck will "learn" the shift points for wide open throttle and that alone can make for some pretty hard shifting and make the shifting kind of confusing at points in daily driving.
Chris - Like slowjoe, I didn't really get on the throttle hard much during the first week for that very reason. I put about 200 miles on it with the performance tune and only a handful of times hit 80-90% throttle.
I noticed the initial two drive cycles were similar to what baja was saying. The truck was searching for the 4-5 gear...didn't like to hold one based on a very fine speed increase or decrease. I had previously read the o.p.'s concern, so was looking for any similar issues.
slowjoe - Where did you previously read about this and what was the final resolution?
slowjoe said:
Also, I noticed a lot of responses to the o.p. in regards to the harsh shifting. I didn't think that was necessarily the complaint? It seemed to be the up/down shifting, back and forth that I understand the problem to be.
Exactly, no complaints about harsh shifting here. Under normal to hard acceleration, the shifts are firm and crisp the way they should be. I don't think I've gone WOT with the tuner yet, but I fully expect WOT shifts to be harsh and have no problem with that; it's my opinion that no performance gains should be spared at WOT.
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Just to be clear, my intention in creating this thread wasn't to slam Mike and/or 5-Star. There's a lot of questions posted about tuners here and I just wanted others to be aware of the characteristics of the 5-Star tunes with a Raptor in hopes to save new customers some guess work.
I ordered this tuner from Chris at Freedom Motorsports loaded with my choice of Mike's 5-Star tunes. Within 10 minutes of placing my order from the Freedom Motorsports website, my phone rang... it was Chris calling to make some suggestions and finalize my order. How's that for personalized customer service?
I ran the performance tune for about a week (200 miles) to gather my initial impressions and had some concerns with the daily drive shifting. I created this thread about it, sent an email to Mike at 5-Star, and just to keep Chris in the loop, I forwarded him the note I sent to 5-Star. On a Saturday morning, within 15 minutes of sending my email, I get a response from Mike at 5-Star looking to resolve my concern and another response from another 5-Star employee named Scott about 20 minutes after that. I don't know about you guys, but when I send an email to a company any time after lunch on a Friday, I don't expect a response until the following Monday at the earliest. The fact that Mike and Scott from 5-Star both responded on a Saturday AND emailed me a new tune to try out was really quite amazing to say the least. Then about 2 hours after I forwarded the email to Chris at Freedom Motorsports, he replies to me with an apology for his "delayed response." If he thinks 2 hours to reply to an email that was sent over the weekend is delayed, then the service at Freedom Motorsports must be aiming to put the "Freaky Fast" Jimmy John's service to shame.
The response times and customer service I'm receiving from 5-Star and Freedom Motorsports are nothing less than STELLAR!!!
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The tune Mike sent me today was a 93 Performance tune, but with factory shifting strategy. Being Easter weekend and having guests visiting, I didn't have a ton of time to test it out. I did load it and take it for about a 10 minute trial and my initial impression is that it's definitely back to the somewhat sluggish OE shifting. I haven't got back with Mike because I want to run it through a few more miles of testing, but my initial thoughts are hoping that there's a happy medium between factory shifting and the performance tune shifting. I really wan't unhappy with the shifting of the performance tune... I think I was just dissatisfied with the shifting in the conditions in which I normally drive. Rather than up and down shift at the same speed, if I could get it to say upshift at 40mph and not downshift unless I drop a few mph below that... like 36-37mph rather than 39mph... I'd be a very happy camper.
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Additionally, I have a friend visiting me for the weekend that has a 2013 Raptor with a 5-Star tuned SCT X3 with over 12k miles total and over 10k miles with the tuner. We were talking about my shifting concerns on Friday night and he said that he never noticed his truck doing what I explained. We went for a ride in his truck and it does the exact same thing as mine under the same conditions. The difference is that I live in an urban city environment and travel a lot of 35-45mph roads and he lives in a very rural area and doesn't have a stop sign, street light, or road with a speed limit below 55mph within a few hundred miles of his house, so he just never noticed it because 99% of his driving is at speeds that upshift and stay in 6th gear.
