Todd951968

What are the best options for an engine management system for a 951 race car? The existing one is >10 years old in a race car that has sat disassembled. Some parts got lost , etc.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Ski

Todays piggybacks are pretty good with their perspective vendor packages, ie Vitesse with the SMT6, his chipboard for the DME with his turbo/MAF package, as is Lindsey with the MAfterburner with their package. CEP does LINK, Chris White has TEC3 - both stand alone systems.

My race car has LR system, with an older VR race chip. 17psi we got 351/348 respectively - haven't dyno'd the new engine but expect a bit more with the few internal changes we made, didn't make a change to the management package.

Todd951968

Thanks

Chris White

The one thing that I always toss out to people looking for an engine management system (standalone or piggy back) – its all about customer support. Check around and make sure that whatever product and Vendor you use give dependable customer support. Don’t be sold on ‘bells and whistles, glossy adds or even cheap prices – it the vendor does not support you the project will not be successful.

I just talked to a person yesterday (I can’t call him a customer – he got his ECU somewhere else) – I looked at his programming files and gave him some advice on why it was programmed wrong and what to do, it took about an hour but in the end he had enough of an understanding on how the system worked that he could work up his own program. The original vendor had charged him $3k in dyno time to tune the engine….and it was not running that well! Lets just say his was pissed bout the ‘tuning fee’ but very happy that he now understood how it worked and he could take care of it himself (with a little phone help!)


I might have a solution for you (!)…..feel free to call to ask questions – 315-636-8716.

gt37vgt

I use Motec on mine but its from the same city as me ..
I think the perfect power looks realy good SMT7 and smt8.
Although its an old sytem plenty of people are pretty happy with varoius motrinic +piggy back rig ups and all the answears are here on this forum.
I think you have to kind of milk standalone to make it worth while ..
so you have to run multi coils boost/tps logging perhaps anti lag luanch control other wise its not realy worth the trouble .
also some of the sensors and trigger set ups need a bit of work to make good use of standalone ..

Chris White

I still believe that one of the biggest benefits of the standalone systems on our cars is the ability to throw the stock harness out the window. If your stock harness is working great then John’s (Vitesse) stuff is first class and works great, he can get the Motronic ECU to do most of the good stuff that a standalone will do. But if your harness is deteriorating the standalone systems suddenly become a lot more attractive!

The other pluses of standalones are diagnostics, datalogging and the ability to easily tweak the tune. There are a lot of other neat things you can do with the extra outputs – it’s a ‘tweakers’ world. With the programmable tables in the general purpose out puts you can come up with all sorts of things.

My latest pet project is boost level set by throttle position – very nice for a high power street car.

DivineE

Surely the amount of fuel required to alter the A/F ratio by a particular amount is something that could be calculated. Why has no one aftermarket got a system available that logs figures into the cells as you drive and then changes the fueling for those cells as required to correct the A/F ratio. Meaning the car is constantly filling in blanks (learning) and creating its own map of your driving?

I don't mean a 'closed loop' system which tries real time to adjust fueling as you drive (like my Audi did when the MAF wasn't working correctly) because I know the process isn't fast enough and the fueling is always trying to catch up.

I mean a system which saves the information as it goes so the next time you pass that throttle point the data has been adjusted. A car that constantly maps itself.

fast951

This system exists. You set the AFR target based on load & RPM, the system calculates the required changes to get to the AFR target.

fast951

You don't need a standalone for this

fast951

I can't agree more with you.

Chris White

I know...the stock KLR does this already - but not as a continuous variable – just as a WOT step function!

Chris White

Yes, many systems can do this. However – I don’t not trust any of them, to do it ‘perfectly’ because there are too many variables. For example – the A/F ratio in any given ‘cell’ can be different if you are accelerating, decelerating or at a steady speed when you pass through that cell. When you read a datalog you know the running condition and you can decide how much ‘faith’ to put into the correction.
The Electromotive method allows you to review the proposed changes to the mapping and modify them before accepting the changes.

theedge

Most decent standalones do this, although not on a long term basis. They do it for tuning then maps get saved and closed loop O2 correction takes over, which never changes maps and SHOULD be set to a low correction %. Usually called AutoTune, etc. Link has it, MegaSquirt does, I assume Electromotive does. Self tuning fuel is easy given correct inputs and such.

If youre talking about doing it on the stock system to tune the chips, that gets harder. It would be a software thing in the chip tuning software.

In any case, you need a wideband.

fast951

I'm talking about the PB.

Chris White

Wow, you are using Peanut Butter to control boost now?