EVP's Research and Development Team has worked hard for months developing and testing to bring the Maverick R community the best-performing upgrades possible for your ride.
This brings us to a new feature that will blow your mind and destroy your competition - transmission tuning. Much like with a CVT, optimizing the Maverick's DCT provides amazing gains to the performance and feel of the vehicle. The issue with the Maverick R and the stock transmission tuning is that it's always hunting for the right gear. This is especially true when the vehicle is in high-load terrain such as dune riding or fast desert riding with big tires. The 999cc engine does not have enough power at lower RPMs (5000-7000) to pull a gear, so the stock transmission strategy is to downshift under load to put the transmission back into the power band. This is quite annoying in the lower gears, especially during dune riding, because some downshifts are for a split second before another upshift, where the car hardly moves, and it feels like the downshift didn't accomplish anything. In the higher gears, it is the opposite issue; with stock transmission tuning, the transmission won't downshift when you want it to. This takes the fun out of riding and can put you in a precarious position in some technical situations.
The second issue is the shift points are very low compared to the engine RPM characteristics. We have found that the engine continues to build power to a peak at roughly 9100 RPMs, then falls off slightly. With the soon-to-be-released Maverick R intake and an EVP tune, power climbs steadily to 9500 RPM. (Note: there is a Technical Service Bulletin (TSB) for early production Maverick R's for the timing chain tensioner, this TSB must be completed before tuning the vehicle for higher than stock revs). By extending the shift points by 800 RPMs, even with the stock tune, the annoying downshift will build considerable speed and not feel unnecessary. When we add power with the engine tune, the benefits become even more pronounced by building significantly more speed between gears as the engine revs out. Depending upon the gear, this can be 5-10 mph faster over the stock shift points.
For the downshift strategy, as the fuel octane increases, we can add power at lower RPM with increased boost and ignition. On the 110-octane tune, the engine produces 50-wheel horsepower over stock at 6000 rpms, and on E85, it is 72 whp! This completely transforms the vehicle and reduces the need for a downshift, especially shifts 4th to 3rd and 3rd to 2nd. We have refined the downshift strategy based on how much additional power we can add in the lower RPM range. The 91-octane tune has a relatively stock downshift strategy whereas the 110-octane and E85 have a highly modified downshift strategy. We cannot express enough how much this improves the car. It completely revitalizes the Maverick R from a fair dune car, at best, to one of the most fun SXS you will ever experience. The shifting is now almost CVT-like, where no matter what gear you are in, it feels like the shifts are necessary, and power is always on tap.
In addition to all the other product development work we have been doing on the Maverick R, we found the much-needed time to implement an adjustable launch control similar to the MG1 X3. A geared transmission makes it a bit more complex to implement, but since EVP brought factory ECU launch control to the SXS community in 2018, we did not let the challenges stand in our way! Learn more about the Maverick R Launch Control here.
