THE BADLANDS BRONCO

On a snowy February day, Jayson Ziemba travelled all the way from Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, in his 2022 Bronco 2.7L twin turbo Badlands SAS Edition. Jason had found links to our two previous Bronco videos and, after several phone calls with us, decided to trust us with putting his highly modded ride on our chassis dyno for tuning.

This Bronco is not just another mall crawler. Jayson is an avid offroad enthusiast and member of the Michigan Bronco Club. Hitting the Michigan trails regularly, he’s outfitted his Badlands with numerous offroad mods and a ton of other accessories.

Off-road and other modifications

FIRST AID & RECOVERY
Trauma/First Aid Kit
Defibrillator
Stapler/Sutures
EpiPen x3
Narcan x3
Fire Extinguisher x2
Emergency Water 1 Gal
Rhino 1″ Kinetic Recovery Rope
Soft Shackles
Jump Box
Tricky Dick Tie Rod Repair Kit

EXTERIOR
DV8 Aluminum wheel well liners Front/Back with thumb screws
DV8 A-arm, rear shock, rear diff skids
Maxxis Buckshot 2’s 35×12.50×17 W/ ice studs
Fab Fours sliders
Anderson Composite Type R hood (Carbon)
Anderson Composite Halo/Donut doors
Archaic Led Taillights Full Led Smoke

The Tuning Goals

First, Jayson has added every conceivable bolt-on performance booster to his Bronco to demonstrate how much HP a stock 2.7L can make. Before arriving at International Dyno Authority, Jayson hadn’t dyno-tested the Bronco to see what kind of numbers his mods generated, so we shared some anticipation over what the numbers would look like pre-tune.

Second, Jayson wanted to determine just how much power this 2.7L twin turbo could generate with a custom tune on the chassis dyno at International Dyno Authority.

And Jayson’s third goal was to increase the torque available, with minimum driver input, for trail riding and rock crawling.

The baseline pulls

For the baseline pull, we disconnected the JB4 to see how the Bronco would perform with a stock tune. We did five baseline passes on the dyno. The pulls sounded good right from the start, with the turbo coming on at the right time. The Bronco’s first pull results were:
PkTq: 285.60 @ 3700 RPM
PkHP: 222.92 @ 4500 RPM
[Table 1]

(Editor’s Note: as explained above, the JB4 was disconnected for the baseline pulls.)

Another significant limiting factor we fully expected was the heavy 35″ Maxxis Buckshot tires on this Bronco. We achieved better baseline results when we tested and tuned a Bronco Big Bend Edition that was running the much lighter 32″ stock tires

tuning the bronco – round 1

We made incremental changes to the boost and fuel curves during the initial tuning passes. Midway through the tuning, we were looking at:
PkTq: 400.85 @ 3800 RPM
HP: 307.83 @ 4500 RPM,
representing a gain of 102.29 ft-lbs of PkTq and 88 HP.
[Table 3]

Jayson began to smile again and become hopeful about what we might achieve.

Maxing out the fuel system

After an hour or so of tuning, we felt we’d hit the maximum of what this Bronco was going to make with an impressive:
PkTq: 451.62 @ 4200 RPM
HP: 383.38 @ 4700 RPM
[Table 4]

An increase of 153.06 ft-lbs. of Tq and 160.46 HP from the baseline. Again, with the significant limiting factor of the heavy 35″ tires.

Definitely, a step up from the Wildtrak Sasquatch Edition we tuned last month, which also ran with similar heavy tires, with the Badlands besting the Wildtrak by 44.51 HP.

We knew there was more power to be tapped in this Badlands, but we ran into a problem with the engine running out of fuel system coming up against 90% plus injector duty cycle and tripping the knock sensor to shut down the engine.

Let’s think about this

Wally decided to stop tuning at this point. A fundamental principle at International Dyno Authority is that our tuning must be safe. We never want to run into a situation where a vehicle we’ve tuned blows an engine due to incorrect or “on-the-edge race-style” tuning.

We recommend that Jayson invest in a Methanol Kit for this 2.7L powermill. A “Meth kit” injects a finely atomized spray of methanol into the cold charge pipe to reduce air inlet temperature and maintain the octane level, thus suppressing detonation/knock and preventing tripping the knock sensor that shuts down the engine.

For this kit, we recommended Alkycontrol. We’ve had excellent results with this company. Their quality standards are exceptionally high. We understand that Jason has already been in contact with them, and they are custom building his kit to match his Bronco, which will include the post-tune power results.

round 2 – making the world’s most powerful bronco

Wally had a long discussion with Jason about the risks of continuing the tune. Jason expressed his intention of having the Meth kit installed as soon as he returned to Michigan and to be careful not to push the Bronco to its limits in the meantime. As a result, Wally agreed to have another go at tuning to see if he could maximize the potential offered by all of the performance modifications.

Wally got back behind the wheel and made a few more tweaks. The result:
PkTq: 507.96 @ 4200 RPM
PkHP: 423.24 @ 4500 RPM
[Table 5].