I would absolutely do some research before hiring a shop to due your work. Do not make my same $$$$ mistakes that i did. Do not only shop research but the package they are recommending as well. I recently went through a nightmare of a situation hiring a Very Large well known shop here in Texas. I told them what I was after and completely trusted them for several reasons. They had a nice shop with fancy colors, lots of lifts and quite a few cars sitting around the shop and LOTS of You Tube videos promoting their cams with really cool names. Their Dyno also seems to make about 20 - 30 more Hp than anybody else. All great stuff to draw customers in and buy a package that is far from optimized for the specific application. I bought the hype, I bought the giant noisy cam, I bought the giant throttle body, I was sold injectors big enough to run John Forces funny car. Oh sure the car runs ok and sounds very angry but the driveability suks big ones. The car has 0 low end torque and takes ton of throttle and clutch to get out of the driveway not to mention the surging and bucking and will even die sometimes. I know, I know it needs a good tuner with duty cycle that with some dashpot this and so on ( please no need to try and impress me with tuner jargin ) Just because it runs does not mean a dang thing when it comes to a proper set up. I did a grip of research and found the car was just plain set up wrong. After finding a real engine man who can also tune we put it on paper and came to an agreement based on the heads / cc chambers, intake, tb, header tube size and so on that the car just was not set up correctly. We put the car on a 3rd party dyno and got REAL numbers about 25hp less than what it pulled from the Super Shop. So we put a new set up together and changed the cam (SMALLER) changed the Nick Williams 102 T.B (SMALLER) changed the gigantic injectors to (SMALLER) and a few odds and ends and put a new tune on it. The car is a different animal by miles. It has EXCELLENT driveability and it actually made around 10 more hp with a much fatter torque curve almost right off idle all the way up, which made it very easy to drive. So all in all the car is faster and much, much easier to drive. I hope this story can help a few folks before they waste their $$$$ for a You Tube car and end up as frustrated as I was. My advice would be to not get sucked into big name shops selling big parts with cool names thinking they are ALL that. Have your shop / builder put it ALL on paper, get a second opinion or even a 3rd before you pull the trigger and make sure the parts compliment each other and not the Bank account of the shop.

 

I feel for you, man. And I agree with you 100%. Always do your research. I made a much smaller mistake than what you're explaining, but a similar situation. I won't go into details but I let the wrong shop "attempt" to tune my car. Long story short, I'll be heading over to Cunningham Motorsports for a real tune.

 

Sounds like everyone involved didn't know what they wanted. First things first, explain the goals of the car,...the useage,...etc...then build it. Rarely do I recommend big cams to anyone but,..I woudn't run anything else in a personal setups. Different strokes, different folks.

 

Name of shop? PM if necessary.