The confusing policy of providing 3 software revisions to the customer would become VAST’s excuse to halt work on my tune.  It was prior to beginning the tuning process that I received a clear statement from Mike Shimon the owner of VAST Performance about just what the tuning would entail.  He told me:

“Hey Jeff,

thanks for the update. I'm glad things are moving along!

If there's anything along the way that you need help with, dialing in your base tune, etc., just let us know. Please note that dialing in your base tune when you get it running, doesn't affect us revising the tune down the road(You get 3 free revisions thereafter).

Take care,

Mike”

It still wasn’t clear to me what this meant, so I asked what he meant by 3 revisions and the reply was:

“Hi Jeff,

I just meant that there's no charge to tweak your base file so that it's nice for you to use all year round. And, if you need any bigger changes, we revise it for you a few times for free...let's say one month you add methanol or another month you add race gas, etc.

Thanks,

Mike”

It was clear to me now that they would start with a base file from which revisions would be made to get the tune refined.  Subsequent to that phase, if I wanted a race gas tune, or a methanol/water injection tune, they’d be able to do those as well.

I discovered a while later that I was incorrect in thinking I would be able to use each tune.  I envisioned purchasing a separate ECU and having a race gas file tuned to it.  I couldn’t imagine anybody driving around 100% of the time on a 100 octane fuel file, the costs would be astronomical for a daily driver to use $6+ gasoline all the time.

As prior experience of mine had been with APR, who provided software settings to me for regular pump gas, 91 octane, 93 octane, 100 octane, 104 octane, and a water injection tune, and I had dealt with EPL who supplied me with a separate files on different ECU’s for 93 octane, 100 octane, and a Valet tune, I was figuring if I provided the ECU’s that VAST would be able to put these later revisions for race gas or water injection onto them.  I was wrong.