Originally Posted by
XtremeJumpin16
I have heard people tune to the temp their car is at. The hotter the car gets, the richer they set it. I have also heard people tune to smoke and performance. When their performance drops and/or their smoke cloud lessens, they richen it and vice versa. What do you guys prefer? Which is better?
NEVER tune to a set temperature. There are too many factors involved that can change temps without changing the tune. Tune to performance/smoke and use temperature only as a reference to make sure you aren't going to burn anything up. Over the course of a race day, I've seen temps vary from 215 to 255 without changing the tune. Performance was good all day long and I always had good smoke, so the fact that it varied 40 degrees didn't bother me at all. Might even vary more than that, depending upon weather, clouds, humidity, etc.
Use the wintertime as an example. If i'm bashing in January and it's 20F degrees outside, I can lean it out a TON and still not be hot. But if my magic number is 230, i'm going to kill the engine because I had to lean it so much to get the desired temperature. Make sense?