In a Dodge for the most part with a ZF transmission the way the TCM will be more or less aggressive is determined by three factors: choosen setting, fred flinstone foot and road grade (up/down) hill. When you want to see the internals of the tune you log a few channels in HP tuners but the main ones are "trans shift situation" and "shift id". As an example at the track last night I was in "trans shift situation" = 4. What this means is that in the table 30004 (Shift Pattern Situation Mapping) you can glean the numbers 201/400 & 5/9 in the corresponding row. The count colums are a counter for how aggressive you have been with your foot. The more aggressive the higher up you go in count max and that is interpolated accross the range 5-9 (linear interpolation).
From there you map that to 30003 (Shift Pattern Driver Type Mapping).
As you can see I was in a range of 5-9 with different ranges. To see what that is really doing you will then take that data and map it to your aggression mapping. Example: Count Max: 400, Type Max: 9 would map in the following table (30002) Shift Pattern Aggression Mapping.
0 = Normal
1 = Normal Perf
2 = Sport
3 = Sport Perf
4 = Track
But wait WHY DO both sport and track blend into Sport Performance based on your aggression. In a hellcat Sport Perf. is the most balls out performance you can get in a stock tune. I will go into the aggression mapping now and how this relates to Shift ID. In your logs you usually log Shift ID. In my run last night I was in Agression Mode 2 (Sport) and hit Shift IDs 22, 17 and 7. Well that's all fine and dandy but what the hell do those mean? Look at this image below:
On Agg. 2 (Sport) I can only hit 2, 7, 12, 17 and 22. How the TCM determines this is deeper in the firmware and I'm sure using a linear interpolation like above AFAIK. Inside of these Shift ID's you have your OSS rpm shift parameters. OSS (output shaft speed) rpm gets converted to RPM for us non zf tcm people and that's the shift schedule your trans will shift at. Some are more aggressive than others. Well why do you have this dark knowledge, who did you kidnap at Dodge and eat his brain to learn this from, just why??? Well because I lurk on the HP Tuners forums and I wanted to learn how to tune my TCM. Now Lets revisit this talk about Sport vs. Track and confine it to the context of the TCM. Lets think about what happens at a drag strip vs a twisty. Twisty may have long runways, you may already be at speed coming out of a turn which means half mile down the road you can accelerate from 60 to 170. The tables reflect this and you can see in the absurd 9000 rpm shift from 7-8 that yes is programmed in the factory tune:
(4, 9 and 14 are from Aggression 4, track mode, also not all five tables, don't have a screen big enough for all 10 tables)
So from the factory why is sport performance, aggression 3 the best mode? Simply look at the tables in 3, 8 and 13:
It has a good blend of what you will see at higher RPM on the twisty and will hold gear better if you are doing a drag. Well how do I get to Sport Perf (aggr. 3) from my UConnect screen, you don't (maybe if you Fred Flinstone it enough you can drop into 3 which you usually will do at the track). What you do is get a custom tune where your tuner balls to the walls all three agressions and move along.
All my aggression settings from 2, 3, and 4 are pretty much the same and guarantee nuttyness in the 1->2->3->4->5 shifts at the track weather I select Sport or Track. If anyone has any TCM related questions for performance I can answer them to the best of my ability. Stay tuned part 2 for how the engine reacts based on modes is coming next. Hope this helps
@covidcommander
