Lamborghini Temerario ECU Tuning: First Look at Performance and Calibration Development

When the ECU unlock for the Lamborghini Temerario came out, it caught us by surprise. We had already bought a Ferrari 296 in house to do development, and were waiting for the crack to be available for that ECU. Lo and behold, we now have an opportunity to create something for this platform, The Lamborghini Temerario, that will be a mainstay for the next decade and beyond. After a few days of the unlock being released, I decided we need to have one in house. I went to the dealership the same day, asked them how many Temerarios they had, to which they replied, "one." I figured it must be for me, so let's rock. 

Now waking up one day and deciding one half a million dollar car loan isn't enough and needing two, was not on my bingo card, but here we are. I spent my entire Friday at the dealership and brought home a Arancio Xanto Temerario, and was so excited to start work on it. As I put a few hundred miles on it a few things stuck out as needing improvement so I focused my reverse engineering efforts to address the shortcomings of the factory software. 

The car has a very sluggish gas pedal compared to the 296, especially noticeable in electric mode. The 296 is far more torquey than the Temerario and with both cars being hybrids with two turbos I knew this is a choice they made deliberately. Unlike the 296, the Temerario has all-wheel drive, so it can put the torque down better. I noticed it takes forever for the Temerario to reach operating temp and unleash the full rev limit of 10,250RPM, but that is not something that needs changing. 

The car is exciting at high RPM, but it felt almost like an S2000 where I had to downshift a lot in order to pass someone or feel like I'm in a 900HP car. If you like that, it can for sure be retained, but for me I missed the punchy-ness of the 296. The stock car doesn't need much to be fun and happy, we can also keep exhaust flaps open on the stock system to make you feel like you have an exhaust without fear of warranty issues. 

When I drove in a Temerario that had a straight piped exhaust, there were two things I absolutely knew I needed to address right away. One was the absolutely chaotic cold start that lasts 5 minutes, and the other is this gnarly backfire the car comes with from the factory programming. The stock exhaust is SO RESTRICTIVE, that they had to do something crazy in the program to coax any noise out of it. The problem then is when you remove that restriction in the exhaust, you are going to avoid Corsa mode entirely because it makes a god awful BMW-esque pop and bang noise. The cold start logic is also something that will for sure elicit letters from your HOA, and possibly even SpaceX to see what kind of rocket you are launching. 

These are things that are proprietary HD things. I see a problem, I find a solution, I tailor your car to your needs. Some people want the noise, some people want refinement, some people want something in between. We are here to deliver your dreams, not just sell you a cookie cutter file. Before I program something in, I spend hundreds of unpaid hours learning the code and how to manipulate it to get the desired result. Let us take your car to the next level, by giving you its hidden potential. You paid for it, you know it's capable of it, so why wait for the performance version to come out when you can get that from HD now?

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