The 5.7L Toyota Tundra is a very good truck right off the showroom floor. The Tundra’s power is rated at 381 hp and 401 lb·ft from the factory. Toyota began selling a bolt-on TRD Supercharger kit for the 5.7-liter V8 Tundra during June 2008. Power output is increased to 504 hp (376 kW) and 550 pound-feet. This TRD kit is only made for the non-flex fuel trucks. This is where the aftermarket world steps in.
We recently had a customer come to us and ask us to find a way to make the TRD Supercharger work with his flex-fuel Toyota Tundra. Knowing already that this is not a factory option supported by toyota, we began to do some research on the matter. What we found was that the actual supercharger kit would physically fit on the truck, but that there was no way to make the factory computer work with it. We did a little digging to find a company called Unichip that makes a “piggyback” style ecu controller that could control the fuel the new supercharged truck would need and the spark that would need to be taken out at wide open throttle conditions. We contacted Unichip and presented them with our situation. To our surprise, we found that their controller would work with our Tundra. We were informed by unichip that they no longer offered a plug and play system and that we would have to wire in the spider harness they offer to our factory wire harness ourselves. Knowing that we have the ability to wire in the spider harness we instantly bought the entire tuning package from them to test it out.
The first thing we did was strap the Tundra to our AWD Superflow dyno and made a baseline dyno pull. The results were good with the truck producing 318HP and 355TQ at the rear wheels in stock form. These numbers are right on par with the factory ratings at the engine. After unloading the truck from the dyno we began the tear-down process. The process of installing the TRD supercharger was extremely straight forward. We followed the instructions and ran into no problems with it. This kit comes complete with some of the best instructions weve ever seen included with a supercharger kit. One thing to consder is that the actual supercharger itself is extremely heavy. We used 3 guys to set it in place to make sure no one got injured. This could be a 2 person job if there was not a 3rd person but we would not recommend to go that route. Our customer contacted us during this install and asked if we knew of any other aftermarket parts we could install to make a little more power. We decided to go with Doug Thorley long tube headers to increase the power and make a deeper sound to enjoy. If you have never installed long tube headers on a Tundra, I would suggest having a professional shop like ourselves do it as it is a very difficult job to do. We decided to go with the adapter plates from Doug Thorley as well because we wanted to maintain the rear cats for emissions and keep the fuel smell down.
Now that the TRD Supercharger, Doug Thorley long tube headers and Unichip controller are installed we can get to tuning. The Unichip controller does come with a base map made for the TRD non-flashed truck which is a good place to start. We loaded up the map and started the truck. The Tundra came to life and sounded amazing! The idle was good and everything seemed to be behaving. We then proceeded to loading the Tundra back onto the dyno. Now it was time for some fun. After making some partial test pulls, we found that our truck needed some more fuel added to be safe. We made our tweaks to the ecu and attemted our first full dyno pull. The truck screamed to life, we crested 6000 rpm’s making 8lbs of boost and put down a respectable 430HP and 437TQ. We adjusted the fuel table and tweaked the timing a bit and made our final pull to see an amazing 458HP and 467TQ! Thats a gain of 140HP and 112TQ. Not bad for a factory TRD Supercharger and long tube header install.
In conclusion, we are very happy with the TRD kit, Unichip and the Header kit we used for this project. This truck can no longer run flex fuel and that is perfectly fine with the customer. The best part of all is that the factory computer works in perfect harmony with the Unichip with no check engine lights what so ever.
If you have any questions regarding this tune, build, or would like to schedule an appointment please contact Jamy Lippencott. If you would like to see the video of this truck on the dyno, please check out our Smokey’s Dyno Youtube Channel.