Hi GraphiteGhost, thanks for your comments. You're correct about the need for a ROI on the custom tunes, I don't think some people appreciate just how long it can take to develop and test a good TCU tune. In this case I don't think I'd have to do very much, it's just a few tweaks on some existing stuff. The Drag Radials would definitely be the best technical solution, but I don't take my car to the track very often and was thinking that a software change might be best for occasional use, as the ROI on drag radials wouldn't be great either. As I'd use the tune personally, I'm not too concerned about how much time I put into it and the knowledge gained would be applicable to a lot of the other Mercedes TCU tunes I do.

I was mainly wondering if the second gear start stuff with a freed up converter would work or not. The TCU tunes I make these days have 4 modes (Sport(S), Winter(C), Manual, & Agility(A)), with better gear changing and far more options than our original Crossfire's ever had. The tunes run some extra software to be able to access the 4 modes and I think (if the drag mode had merit) I could repurpose the Sport or Winter mode into a Drag (X) mode. The only issue with the TCU software is that it uses the same torque converter lock & unlock settings for all modes, so that wouldn't be great when in one of the other modes that don't want a loose second gear. If the X mode worked OK, I could probably write some extra code into the TCU to swap over the torque converter settings when in X and put them back to normal when in the other modes. That way I could run the same TCU all the time and not have to swap it at the track. The solution would be more suited to the occasional racer.