TJ Hunt's 488 with pure turbos tuned by HD Tuning +260hp

Hello Ferrari Chat,

I'm Matt, your verbose Ferrari chat tuning sponsor. I pay an invoice every month in order to be able to share things with you, even though I rarely share. I tune Ferrari's every week, and in order not to overwhelm you with repetitive posts, I wait for big or unique things to share. I very much dislike making content as I'm not a YouTube personality or social media celebrity. I have no desire to be either, because I'm a tuner. That's all I want to do, that's what I signed up for; Nevertheless, it's 2025 and this old dog is being dragged along by the collar to learn new tricks.

Tuning a famous YouTuber's Ferrari is one of those special moments that I thought would be good to share. I had Steven Stierman from HD Tuning AZ, and my media guy, Chance Nielsen, come with me to tune and make content showing the process of dyno tuning this very special 488GTB.

Here is the video if you'd like to stop seeing me typing my thoughts, and prefer listening to them and seeing them:



We spent 2 days at the dyno, the first day was cut short because the original spark plugs the car came with failed when we increased the engine's demand. You'll also see in the video that there were a lot of technical difficulties with the dyno itself even at baseline. Most of the video is just showing the honest truth about what it's like in the day of a tuner, it's not edited to make us look like hero's or deities, there are always unexpected issues that come up and we have to handle them as they come. It's raw and unfiltered, and just shows behind the scenes in an honest way. We tried something new with this format as it's extremely long, but if you're bored and care to watch, here it is.

This dyno had never been used in 2WD mode, and we were told it wasn't possible to unlink the front and rear rollers by the dyno operator. I believe that explains the weird and inconsistent readings even though the car ran perfectly on the street. What we were seeing was the car popping into limp mode towards the end of every run, and this was not happening with the car on the street and TJ assured us that the install of all hardware was perfect and had no leaks. What I was observing in the dyno graph looked like it was a boost related error, because severe timing pull and throttle cut would look and act differently. What I really think was happening is the load was falling off as the car moved forward on the dyno and triggered limp mode. You can see at the end of the video I mention that the dyno is inertia based and I was right on the cusp of realizing what the issue was. Because we hadn't chocked up the front tires, and the car is making so much power, it would lurch forward enough to pop the car into limp in the middle of a pull. I could hear the car switch modes right when it saw something it didn't like, but there is no code and no clues despite forcing the car into dyno mode with my tool. The car with less power (stock) would make it further in the RPM range before we'd see the load discrepancy and limp, which of course means the car wasn't climbing the rollers as much. We had nothing to MacGyver a solution to lock the front wheels in place, but if anyone runs into this issue dynoing their Ferrari in the future, the solution is to keep the front wheels entirely stationary while doing a pull. Ferrari's dyno mode is for 2wd dynos only, I'm not sure how on a linked dyno a car can tell it's on a dyno, but they do.

TJ is happy with the power, happy with the flames we added, and is on to the next phase of the project which is add an authentic GT3 bodykit. The car ended up making an additional 267hp over the baseline, if we got to see higher RPM on the rolling road, it's possible it would show a higher delta. TJ's butt dyno and my estimation would be low 800s at the wheels, if it could rev out all the way. TJ explains in the video at one point what the power was like with our tune coupled with the pure 900 turbos. TJ and Dillon are exactly how they appear online, great to work with, fun, easy going, and humble. The 488 project is something you guys should follow on his YouTube and his social media as it's a cool project.

Thanks for listening, I hope to have more content of our 296 and other Ferrari's we tune soon.