New Member From Pennsylvania

Hi,my name is Jason and I am 24yrs old. I joined HPA to increase my education on tuning for my own personal benefit, as well as hopefully tuning for others if I prove that i have the skill to do a proper job of it on my own vehicles. My experience so far has been road tuning my 91 Celica 3sgte with a Hydra Nemesis 2.7 Ecu. It has a forged bottom end, big cams, gt3076r turbo, and big injectors on pump gas, so it wasnt the easiest to learn on but also made me encounter more aspects of tuning than a NA stock car would have. Also more recently I road tuned my brothers 2000 Chevy 2500 6.0l with a cam upgrade, using Hp tuners. So I walked right into the differences of reflash tuning vs live standalone tuning. Also MAF scaling and VE table vs the millisecond MAP based system of the standalone. I found this quite frustrating until i figured out the concept of the HP setup. I also own a 12 Chevy Cruze 1.4t automatic that i would like to tune with the HP Tuner. Also as friends have discovered my interest in tuning and my access to HP Tuning, a few have asked me to dyno tune their GM and Ford vehicles. My Dad was an auto mechanic, so i grew up around it and learned the basics from him. I bought the Celica with the stock 3sgte engine swap already done when i was about 19. By researching online, I performed all the upgrades on the car myself and have been running it hard on 20psi of boost and my own street tune for about 3 years now with no problems.II currently work in a truck shop, and work on mostly Peterbuilt and Kenworths, and would also like to learn diesel tuning as well at some point. So all this has worked up to me wanting to get a well rounded education on tuning a variety of systems, and builds. End goal is to be a quality professional tuner, and possibly start my own performance shop. But first i must make sure i am 100% qualified and capable before i will consider it. I have completed a few courses and realize how little i actually know, but i love the science behind it all and discovering how much there is to learn, fuels me on. Even once I start tuning, a plan to keep searching for more education on anything car related. The science behind aerodynamics, suspension, and engine performance fascinates me and I nerd out on it.I just wish I had a full scale automotive testing facility to learn every aspect of building cars from ground up. I guess I'll have to settle for learning everything i can about tuning and keep expanding my education and resources from there. I like analyzing data, and seeing the results from the changes you make, and learning the formulas for calculating necessary changes. I also day dream about outside of the box ideas for performance and love seeing new concepts come out like variable compression, and camless engines, where someone actually turned those ideas into reality. So yeah, basically a huge fan of anything performance, and knowing all the details on how it works. Good luck to all out there on the same or similar journey.

Hi Jason, Welcome to HPA.

Is the Celica 2WD? do you know what kind of power it's running?

Yes it is still 2wd, I put the e153 trans in from a v6 solara, which has tall gears and an open diff. I like the gearing but it could really use lsd, quite a bit of wheel spin as soon as boost hit in 1st and 2nd gear. Most cars with the same setup are dynoing between 400-500whp, and my friends stock 12 Nissan GT-R can slowly walk away from it on a rolling race. So I'm hoping once I dyno tune it and dial in the timing, I can at least see 400whp, I try not to get my hopes up though. I also have a meth injection kit waiting to install, so I can probably make a bit more power with that. Honestly I shouldn't be to concerned about the final number it makes, since it's already plenty for fwd and torque steer is already a challenge to keep controlled. The problem is that you get used to the power and you start to think your car is slow and should have more, but at this point I need to balance the handling and traction to the power it already has before adding more power to the situation.