SPT Intake and AP

OK, so I have been doing a little reading and it seems that I may have jumped the gun a little. I bought a SPT intake with the heat shield and then I installed AP and realized that there are no Cobb OTS maps for an aftermarket intake.

After researching both here and at Cobb, it seems like everyone pretty much agrees that the intake doesn't do much but add noise to the car at stage 1 or 2, but there seems to be 2 schools of thought: 1) it doesn't help but it won't hurt anything other than you might run a little rich until the ecu adjusts; and 2) it will screw up your car to run an intake and an AP without a protune (using one of Cobb's OTS maps).

So, now I'm afraid to upload the stage 1 map with my intake. So what is the general consensus here? I already have the spt intake, so it can't really be seen as a "waste of money, spend it elsewhere" because I've already wasted that money. So, should I go back to the stock air box or just keep the SPT and do the stage 1 map anyways?

Oh, and just FYI, my plans for the performance of the car are pretty vanilla. It is a daily driver, the intake adds a little coolness audio factor, but I didn't see any improvement after installing it. I am guessing that the furthest I would take this car is stage 2, but that is probably quite a while down the road - I just happened to get killer deals on both items, so I bought them without doing much research. I've modded other cars before and this is the first one that the intake doesn't do much of anything compared to stock.

you shouldnt have problems with an spt short ram... cold air intakes like aem cause lean problems

and as far as your plans go, stage 2 is a great daily driver and the best bang for the buck IMO but once youre done i would get a protune not only to get a little more power but also to smooth everything out

you can order a stage 1 e-tune for the intake to be a little safer. Tuning Alliance (vendor here) does e-tunes for $75. not only will Mike tune for your intake, but it will be much more optimized than the cobb OTS one. Also, with the new cobb AP firmware you will be able to log and send him files back to make sure it is running properly. he would email you the map and you load it onto your AP, and then flash the car with it as your base map.

PM him, he's very helpful...

While I have never tuned the SPT intake, if it is like the other short intakes out there, your a/f ratio will not hit the target that Cobb has applied in the tuning, it will most likely be a little lean. I'm not going to comment whether it will be safe or not, that depends on too many variables, but there are many tuners out there that will send you an e-tune for less than $100 that will have the correct calibration for your intake.

The biggest problem I found with an un-tuned intake is the cold start hesitation (lean), and overall poor driveability. It feels as if I stepped back into a 1977 Ford pickup..

Jeremy