*** Official B8 A5/S5/RS5 Show And Tell What You Did To/With Your "5" Today ***

[Whinny SQ5]

Went on a trip from CO to FL, stopping along the way to visit family.

Loaded up the S5 with the SQ5's engine. Who needs a pickup truck when you have a sporty coupe? LOL!


Check out the backward rake. The engine is certainly not light.


The first few days of our trip were quite uneventful, which is a good thing. That was until our second leg of the journey when we were on our way to visit my parents. The S5 started throwing codes for multiple EPC things and going into limp mode. We came prepared with OBD11 and my laptop. So passenger princess (aka my spouse) looked through the codes and performed data logging while I drove. The car would be fast AF (wonderful negative DA of sea level states) for one pull and then throw a code and go into limp mode right after shifting. We concluded the gears inside the bypass valve had to be too worn and "too slow" to respond for the computer to be happy.

For the third leg of our journey, going down to AMTuned in Florida, I tried my best to not get past 4K rpm as that seemed to be when the car would throw codes. That worked pretty well. S5 still went into limp mode a few times, but deleting the codes and cycling the ECU brought her back to normal every time.

Finally made it to the new AMTuned shop.


Met with Alex. Amazing guy and super passionate about his trade. We talked for a while and I mentioned the issue I was having with the S5. He was like "I have a spare blower if you want the part". So we went to his old shop, he showed me around the shop, talked about the cars he was working on, lent me some tools, and let me have the bypass valve off of his spare blower. My spouse and I swapped it over right then and there. We opened up the one that came out of the S5 and found that the gears were indeed worn. Super satisfying to have correctly diagnosed the issue.

Since the shop was pretty much right next to the beach, we seized the moment and took a walk in the sand. We had made it all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the tropical-like beaches of Florida all while carrying an engine in the trunk. It would be the last time we experience nice weather for the remainder of the trip.




With the S5 now fixed and smoking the winter tires on IE's DP 93 octane tune, we started our trek back to CO. Uneventful trip back except for really cold temperatures in the Midwest and the fact the S5 made it to 100k miles.