To address the points in the order they were raised :
We would like to thank the original poster for posting on our behalf for a loan development car ..however we feel we should also respond to some of the points raised as it casts rather a shadow over our business practises .
To the customer with the S3 , during the intercooler development with Star performance , we didn’t charge Star for the intercooler work so we really can’t held responsible if they charged you .. if we had been working with you directly it would have been for free …
Steve, I am sorry if you are not happy …but to my knowledge you haven’t contacted us in any way since you left to say that you were unhappy with the time your car spent here. As I recall we reached a mutually agreeable figure for compensation for us having your car, it was filled with fuel and had a professional valet. If you are in any way unhappy then can I ask that you email either Jamie or Chris at forgemotorsport.co.uk. I feel its a little unfair to hint on a public forum that you were unhappy when you have never given us a chance to put it right.
To explain the Development procedure …the development of any product is much more than the few days/weeks that we have a car in for.
Due to our longstanding involvement in the VAG marketplace we are able to do quite a bit of R&D without a car at all.
With regards the Golf 6 intake, we already have a mock-up ready to test. It may be that it will work out of the box, in which case the customer will only be without a car for a few days. The twintake is simply incompatible with the revised MAF fitted on European spec GTi’s (not ED35’s though) so we are testing a single intake, a variant of which we have tested for the past year on our own Audi TTS.
Yes in an ideal world we would have the money to buy each car for development, do all our testing and R&D, then sell the car on, but it’s just not practical for the amount of products and markets we cater for.
For example in the last couple of months we have had in the shop for 2 - 3 weeks or more in total a Nissan GTR , Porsche 996 & 997 , Megane 250 , Audi TT , MKV Golf , all for different products . I think it unreasonable to think we would purchase or finance all these vehicles… When we are looking at a long term project then we will buy the car , ( such as Golf MK7 ) already listed as waiting with 5 dealers.
Most tuners who are developing products will do this Revo – Milltek etc.
When we test ANY products we do not simply “ rag the car round the track “ the process is always explained to the customer before we take the vehicle , We use an independent rolling road for the dyno tests and we test on a quiet section of dual carriage way , within the speed limits when doing engine/ ECU / Data logging .
All the cars are insured fully comprehensive and so are the drivers in a separate trade policy , the cars are stored at night in a secure , CCTV , Red Care alarmed premises .
IF something goes wrong with the car we take care of it …
On the Megane RS250, this is merely hearsay . This was back in the day when only RS Tuning were marketing a remap for the Megane. The customer didn’t want to pay RS Tuning to map it, and asked us to do so, which we did, but didn’t turn everything up to 11 as a dedicated Renault tuner maybe would have done. We took the customer to the dyno (FOC) and rolling roaded the car in front of him BEFORE he paid any money so he knew he was getting a lower power map. He left very happy. It definitely wasn’t a half assed map, it just didn’t deliver the same peak power as an RS Tuning map. As for the exhaust comment, we have never fitted exhausts on any customer car so any misalignment was not down to us.
Maybe our way of getting cars in for development isn’t to everybodys taste, but its not unusual in the industry at all. We have had some interest so we hope to be bringing a new Golf Mk6 intake to market soon.
