How to make the most of a day at the dyno | Articles

Have a Plan

We never go to the dyno without a plan. Usually, we prefer to keep the plan simple.

While we’ll occasionally spend the whole day on the dyno making a lot of tests and pulls, we usually find it better to spend less than an hour looking at just a few variables rather than a whole day looking at a lot of them. The more variables you have in your testing session, the more chance you have to make mistakes or misinterpret your data.

As an example, we may decide to work on dialing in our car’s ignition. Our plan would be to first baseline the car with the stock ignition. Before starting, however, we’d check the timing and record it. Then we would install any parts we want to test, usually one at a time (more on this later), and see how they do with the timing set the same as stock. Once we find the best combination of parts, we’d adjust the timing a bit at a time to find the best setting for power. In the above example, we’ve outlined about an hour’s work and could probably make 15 to 30 pulls on the dyno. You’ll notice we’re doing nothing with the induction side of the engine—in an ideal world, we’d come back and do that at a different session.

If we did do it at the same session, we’d first do all of the ignition testing and then move on to the induction work (for which we’d have a separate plan). We would not intermix any of these tests as they could confuse our data and thinking.

Tune Your Car First

Contrary to what some people may think, a dyno session shouldn’t be used for much “tuning.” About 90 percent of your tuning should be done before you get to the shop, with just the remainder dialed in on the dyno.

We’ve been to a lot of dyno sessions and dyno days where cars go on the rollers and can’t even make a full pull because they’re running so poorly. While we’ve been able to get them running…