Back in a Lotus - 2006 Exige S
Discussion
Fonzey said:
Ishy kept contributing to car setup tweaks, and we found ourselves running the rear dampers on their stiffest setting by the end of the day. Trying to prop up the rear a bit on the fast direction change of Port Froid, and ideally we would go stiffer still as it wasn't really compromising us anywhere else, even in the damp the traction was fine in slower corners. Looking like an argument for some stiffer springs I think, but need to check with Nitron first whether my valving is suited to it.
I run the Cornering Force ARB set-up which has a smaller rear ARB, which is primarily there to balance out the fairly stiff (but very adjustable) front, but I do notice it supports the rear of the car quite well without having to run stiffer rear springs. Not sure if they sell the rear bar set-up separately, although its likely to be significantly pricier than a pair of rear springs.This is on a VX220 with Exige-spec Bilsteins, and mostly road but you get the picture.
gofasterrosssco said:
I run the Cornering Force ARB set-up which has a smaller rear ARB, which is primarily there to balance out the fairly stiff (but very adjustable) front, but I do notice it supports the rear of the car quite well without having to run stiffer rear springs. Not sure if they sell the rear bar set-up separately, although its likely to be significantly pricier than a pair of rear springs.
This is on a VX220 with Exige-spec Bilsteins, and mostly road but you get the picture.
The rear-ARB comes up in conversation occasionally, but it never made it to the point of being a "mainstream" modification. Perhaps I'll explore it one day, but I don't think my driving capability is anywhere close to exploiting the lack of rear ARB, I feel the same about going stiffer on springs too actually - seems wrong that I'm needing a more 'focussed' setup when I know I'm still chunks of time away from maxing the car out. I think the one exception is Blyton, I'm maybe a bit closer to the limits of the car there just because I've done it over, and over again so I need to be considerate of that before I go and 'ruin' my car everywhere else.This is on a VX220 with Exige-spec Bilsteins, and mostly road but you get the picture.
Hethel Update
Attended a trackday at Lotus HQ last weekend, unfortunately no cameras allowed on site so not much in terms of pics/videos but was a good day nonetheless.
I last visited Hethel in 2016 and to be honest it was a bit of a dump. The factory itself looked like it wasn't producing much of anything, lots of weeds/overgrown bushes around the track and a few abandoned cars littered the grounds around the circuit. Thanks to the Geely money though they've had a pretty drastic transformation, beautiful visitor centre thing, manicured lawns and a few prestige classics dotted around made it feel like a totally different place.
Track was great too, perfect tarmac, nice kerbs etc. I remember not gelling with the track THAT much back in 2016, and you definitely get reminded that it's a circuit built to test cars, and not to make a driver feel "good" on a regular basis. Lots of flowing sequences that are easy to get wrong, and very hard to know when you've got right. Oh, it's very fast too. They slow you down with a cone-chicane but still exceeded my fastest speed records (according to my dash) by a good 10mph...!
I had a kind offer from a friend to take me some spare wheels down, so for the first time ever I could try tracking a Lotus on a "road tyre" for a bit. I did the first two sessions on my AD08RS and treated them with a bit of respect, but honestly the car felt fine. After 10mins or so they did start making lots of squealing noises under heavy braking and turning (but not locking up) so I didn't try pushing them further. The car generally felt the same in terms of characteristics, didn't feel lairy and was fun enough to drive.
That said, I bolted my ZZRs back on for the third session and the car immediately felt a LOT faster. Obviously it's hard to say on a non-timed event, but if I was the sort of person who would have some sort of GPS device in the car that could log times I could probably say with some confidence that the car was immediately 4.X seconds quicker on the first lap out, eventually becoming 7.5 seconds by the end of the day. But I'm not, so I can only speculate.
My damper settings remained as they did at Blyton and I had no reason to touch them all day.
Just before lunch I realised I wasn't getting a lambda reading to my dash, here we go again. Quick check with the laptop and sure enough, lambda probe has died. I was happy with my fuelling prior to the lambda failure, so I went ahead without wideband correction for the rest of the day.
This is my third probe to fail now.
First one (supplied and fitted by RRR) lasted 2 months-ish and a couple of trackdays
Second one (in hindsight probably a fake) lasted 1 month and no miles at all
Third one (again supplied by RRR) has lasted me all year and 8 or so trackdays
If the next one survives another 8 trackdays/9months I can probably live with treating them as a consumable, but if this one dies quickly I really need to figure something out. Potential options are to 'downgrade' to an LSU4.2 which are considered a bit more robust if not slower to respond, weld something into the manifold to shield the probe a bit (Lotus (or Toyota more likely) did this on some later manifolds). Final option is to run a totally separate wideband controller and add it as an input to the ECU.
Interestingly (or not) later in the afternoon I got a check engine light on the dash, I noticed it at about 7000rpm in fifth gear so I shat my pants expecting the sound of a grenade going off behind me but later analysis in the pits showed me it was just reporting the Lambda failure. This is odd because none of my other failures have registered as a failure in this way, and it's also odd because the lambda was definitely "constantly dead" because I can see from its output flatlining, but the CEL only flashed up under heavy braking or high-G right hand turns.... Investigation to follow.
Day finished without incident, and the convoy set off for the looooooooong slog back home.
Ended up home for 10pm, and straight to bed for a 6am start to go watch the BTCC at Croft. I'm dead
Well I can't blame Bosch or ECUMaster for this one. Woops, I'll take responsibility for this one.
Though I imagine the wiring is an easy repair job, I'd already ordered a new lambda probe so the old one can go in a box to be fixed another day.
Getting genuine Bosch sensors is not as easy as it sounds, but a general rule of thumb is to consider anything <£100 as a fake, even if it's listed by a reputable company. This one from Opie passes all of the authenticity checks, so fingers crossed.
The factory probe is held onto the subframe by some little clips. I'd re-used these and they've evidently gone AWOL. To give myself a bit more confidence, I added a rivnutted p-clip to the heatshield for the engine mount and hopefully this will prevent any future problems.
Before doing the swap, I used the opportunity of having a legit failure to work on my dash a little bit and created an error for this. This is in addition to the traditional engine warning light, but gives a bit more detail so if it throws up on track again when doing big RPM at high speed, I don't panic quite so much.
Probe all swapped over and working now, but seems I now have a puncture. Fun never ends.
Though I imagine the wiring is an easy repair job, I'd already ordered a new lambda probe so the old one can go in a box to be fixed another day.
Getting genuine Bosch sensors is not as easy as it sounds, but a general rule of thumb is to consider anything <£100 as a fake, even if it's listed by a reputable company. This one from Opie passes all of the authenticity checks, so fingers crossed.
The factory probe is held onto the subframe by some little clips. I'd re-used these and they've evidently gone AWOL. To give myself a bit more confidence, I added a rivnutted p-clip to the heatshield for the engine mount and hopefully this will prevent any future problems.
Before doing the swap, I used the opportunity of having a legit failure to work on my dash a little bit and created an error for this. This is in addition to the traditional engine warning light, but gives a bit more detail so if it throws up on track again when doing big RPM at high speed, I don't panic quite so much.
Probe all swapped over and working now, but seems I now have a puncture. Fun never ends.
Fonzey said:
The rear-ARB comes up in conversation occasionally, but it never made it to the point of being a "mainstream" modification. Perhaps I'll explore it one day, but I don't think my driving capability is anywhere close to exploiting the lack of rear ARB, I feel the same about going stiffer on springs too actually - seems wrong that I'm needing a more 'focussed' setup when I know I'm still chunks of time away from maxing the car out. I think the one exception is Blyton, I'm maybe a bit closer to the limits of the car there just because I've done it over, and over again so I need to be considerate of that before I go and 'ruin' my car everywhere else.
Hethel Update
Attended a trackday at Lotus HQ last weekend, unfortunately no cameras allowed on site so not much in terms of pics/videos but was a good day nonetheless.
I last visited Hethel in 2016 and to be honest it was a bit of a dump. The factory itself looked like it wasn't producing much of anything, lots of weeds/overgrown bushes around the track and a few abandoned cars littered the grounds around the circuit. Thanks to the Geely money though they've had a pretty drastic transformation, beautiful visitor centre thing, manicured lawns and a few prestige classics dotted around made it feel like a totally different place.
Track was great too, perfect tarmac, nice kerbs etc. I remember not gelling with the track THAT much back in 2016, and you definitely get reminded that it's a circuit built to test cars, and not to make a driver feel "good" on a regular basis. Lots of flowing sequences that are easy to get wrong, and very hard to know when you've got right. Oh, it's very fast too. They slow you down with a cone-chicane but still exceeded my fastest speed records (according to my dash) by a good 10mph...!
I had a kind offer from a friend to take me some spare wheels down, so for the first time ever I could try tracking a Lotus on a "road tyre" for a bit. I did the first two sessions on my AD08RS and treated them with a bit of respect, but honestly the car felt fine. After 10mins or so they did start making lots of squealing noises under heavy braking and turning (but not locking up) so I didn't try pushing them further. The car generally felt the same in terms of characteristics, didn't feel lairy and was fun enough to drive.
That said, I bolted my ZZRs back on for the third session and the car immediately felt a LOT faster. Obviously it's hard to say on a non-timed event, but if I was the sort of person who would have some sort of GPS device in the car that could log times I could probably say with some confidence that the car was immediately 4.X seconds quicker on the first lap out, eventually becoming 7.5 seconds by the end of the day. But I'm not, so I can only speculate.
My damper settings remained as they did at Blyton and I had no reason to touch them all day.
Just before lunch I realised I wasn't getting a lambda reading to my dash, here we go again. Quick check with the laptop and sure enough, lambda probe has died. I was happy with my fuelling prior to the lambda failure, so I went ahead without wideband correction for the rest of the day.
This is my third probe to fail now.
First one (supplied and fitted by RRR) lasted 2 months-ish and a couple of trackdays
Second one (in hindsight probably a fake) lasted 1 month and no miles at all
Third one (again supplied by RRR) has lasted me all year and 8 or so trackdays
If the next one survives another 8 trackdays/9months I can probably live with treating them as a consumable, but if this one dies quickly I really need to figure something out. Potential options are to 'downgrade' to an LSU4.2 which are considered a bit more robust if not slower to respond, weld something into the manifold to shield the probe a bit (Lotus (or Toyota more likely) did this on some later manifolds). Final option is to run a totally separate wideband controller and add it as an input to the ECU.
Interestingly (or not) later in the afternoon I got a check engine light on the dash, I noticed it at about 7000rpm in fifth gear so I shat my pants expecting the sound of a grenade going off behind me but later analysis in the pits showed me it was just reporting the Lambda failure. This is odd because none of my other failures have registered as a failure in this way, and it's also odd because the lambda was definitely "constantly dead" because I can see from its output flatlining, but the CEL only flashed up under heavy braking or high-G right hand turns.... Investigation to follow.
Day finished without incident, and the convoy set off for the looooooooong slog back home.
Ended up home for 10pm, and straight to bed for a 6am start to go watch the BTCC at Croft. I'm dead
Just being totally cheeky but……think you may have “exceeded track limits” on those parking bays?…Hethel Update
Attended a trackday at Lotus HQ last weekend, unfortunately no cameras allowed on site so not much in terms of pics/videos but was a good day nonetheless.
I last visited Hethel in 2016 and to be honest it was a bit of a dump. The factory itself looked like it wasn't producing much of anything, lots of weeds/overgrown bushes around the track and a few abandoned cars littered the grounds around the circuit. Thanks to the Geely money though they've had a pretty drastic transformation, beautiful visitor centre thing, manicured lawns and a few prestige classics dotted around made it feel like a totally different place.
Track was great too, perfect tarmac, nice kerbs etc. I remember not gelling with the track THAT much back in 2016, and you definitely get reminded that it's a circuit built to test cars, and not to make a driver feel "good" on a regular basis. Lots of flowing sequences that are easy to get wrong, and very hard to know when you've got right. Oh, it's very fast too. They slow you down with a cone-chicane but still exceeded my fastest speed records (according to my dash) by a good 10mph...!
I had a kind offer from a friend to take me some spare wheels down, so for the first time ever I could try tracking a Lotus on a "road tyre" for a bit. I did the first two sessions on my AD08RS and treated them with a bit of respect, but honestly the car felt fine. After 10mins or so they did start making lots of squealing noises under heavy braking and turning (but not locking up) so I didn't try pushing them further. The car generally felt the same in terms of characteristics, didn't feel lairy and was fun enough to drive.
That said, I bolted my ZZRs back on for the third session and the car immediately felt a LOT faster. Obviously it's hard to say on a non-timed event, but if I was the sort of person who would have some sort of GPS device in the car that could log times I could probably say with some confidence that the car was immediately 4.X seconds quicker on the first lap out, eventually becoming 7.5 seconds by the end of the day. But I'm not, so I can only speculate.
My damper settings remained as they did at Blyton and I had no reason to touch them all day.
Just before lunch I realised I wasn't getting a lambda reading to my dash, here we go again. Quick check with the laptop and sure enough, lambda probe has died. I was happy with my fuelling prior to the lambda failure, so I went ahead without wideband correction for the rest of the day.
This is my third probe to fail now.
First one (supplied and fitted by RRR) lasted 2 months-ish and a couple of trackdays
Second one (in hindsight probably a fake) lasted 1 month and no miles at all
Third one (again supplied by RRR) has lasted me all year and 8 or so trackdays
If the next one survives another 8 trackdays/9months I can probably live with treating them as a consumable, but if this one dies quickly I really need to figure something out. Potential options are to 'downgrade' to an LSU4.2 which are considered a bit more robust if not slower to respond, weld something into the manifold to shield the probe a bit (Lotus (or Toyota more likely) did this on some later manifolds). Final option is to run a totally separate wideband controller and add it as an input to the ECU.
Interestingly (or not) later in the afternoon I got a check engine light on the dash, I noticed it at about 7000rpm in fifth gear so I shat my pants expecting the sound of a grenade going off behind me but later analysis in the pits showed me it was just reporting the Lambda failure. This is odd because none of my other failures have registered as a failure in this way, and it's also odd because the lambda was definitely "constantly dead" because I can see from its output flatlining, but the CEL only flashed up under heavy braking or high-G right hand turns.... Investigation to follow.
Day finished without incident, and the convoy set off for the looooooooong slog back home.
Ended up home for 10pm, and straight to bed for a 6am start to go watch the BTCC at Croft. I'm dead
Fonzey said:
Well I can't blame Bosch or ECUMaster for this one. Woops, I'll take responsibility for this one.
Though I imagine the wiring is an easy repair job, I'd already ordered a new lambda probe so the old one can go in a box to be fixed another day.
I could supply you that for well under £100, direct from Bosch themselves too! Though I imagine the wiring is an easy repair job, I'd already ordered a new lambda probe so the old one can go in a box to be fixed another day.
Anglesey Update
After the biblical conditions of my Anglesey trackday earlier in the year, I wanted another stab at it. I really love the circuit, but hadn't come close to 'leaning' on it yet. This was supposed to be my maiden voyage towing my Exige with the new Volvo V90 daily, but it all got a bit cocked up. I had my B&E towing test booked for September, but then mid-month the Govt' abolished the certification to free up resource for new HGV drivers. The certification and hence my training/test was cancelled immediately but the law change that would allow me to tow without it doesn't come into force until Nov 15th. How annoying.
Anyway, the missus kindly offered to make a weekend of it and follow me over in the Volvo anyway which meant I could take spare tyres, tools, etc. We stopped over with a friend in Snowdonia the night before and arrived at the circuit to find yet more biblical weather.
I started the day out on my "road setup", AD08RS tyres and very soft damping. The car felt pretty grippy to be honest, weak front end but loads of traction even when getting a little bit abusive with the throttle.
Track was rather wet, but no real standing water to worry about so the ZZRs would have probably been "fine" too. I used the opportunity to play with the adjustable traction control that was fitted along with my ECUMaster dash. It has 10 settings which gradually alter both the slip target and the aggressiveness of the intervention. I was warned that it may need tuning and playing with once I'm on a wet circuit or skid pan but on it's most intrusive setting it worked really well, if anything I think it could probably do to be a little more intrusive for a true "nanny mode" but I was pretty impressed.
Rather than just cutting fuel when it detects slip, it's got a gradual way of pulling timing and trying to bring you into the slip target smoothly. The fuel cut only comes in if you're really rough with it, but without the telltale on the dash you wouldn't even know it was triggering half of the time - very impressive. On some of the intermediate settings you could still get a bit of slip and allowed you to really lean on the throttle in the slower corners whilst still feeling like a bit of a hero. Thumbs up ECUMaster for that one, it just works.
The rain was on and off all morning, but over lunch the sun came out and the track started drying out. By 15:30 or so it was completely dry, but still pretty slippy particularly around Church (going onto the back straight) and the final corner where there's a new piece of tarmac which feels like wet glass.
Pace ramped up, and ZZRs went on around 3pm ish. Dampers got stiffened up the session after that and the last couple of hours were fantastic fun.
Uneventful lap, this was about as dry as it got. Still pretty slippery, but could lean on it in a couple of places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pxBsO6UqI&ab...
The day finished with a completely empty fuel tank (put 41litres into a 38litre tank when I limped to Menai Bridge!)
Car didn't get through completely unscathed, lambda sensor (yes, the new one I've only just bought) died after 2 sessions so the car was over fuelling a fair bit to compensate. Meant a few dash warnings through the day but it didn't really spoil the fun, probably a bit down on power.
Still loads more to come from Anglesey though, it's quickly becoming a favourite and there's loads of time to be had there on a properly dry day. Bring on 2022.
After the biblical conditions of my Anglesey trackday earlier in the year, I wanted another stab at it. I really love the circuit, but hadn't come close to 'leaning' on it yet. This was supposed to be my maiden voyage towing my Exige with the new Volvo V90 daily, but it all got a bit cocked up. I had my B&E towing test booked for September, but then mid-month the Govt' abolished the certification to free up resource for new HGV drivers. The certification and hence my training/test was cancelled immediately but the law change that would allow me to tow without it doesn't come into force until Nov 15th. How annoying.
Anyway, the missus kindly offered to make a weekend of it and follow me over in the Volvo anyway which meant I could take spare tyres, tools, etc. We stopped over with a friend in Snowdonia the night before and arrived at the circuit to find yet more biblical weather.
I started the day out on my "road setup", AD08RS tyres and very soft damping. The car felt pretty grippy to be honest, weak front end but loads of traction even when getting a little bit abusive with the throttle.
Track was rather wet, but no real standing water to worry about so the ZZRs would have probably been "fine" too. I used the opportunity to play with the adjustable traction control that was fitted along with my ECUMaster dash. It has 10 settings which gradually alter both the slip target and the aggressiveness of the intervention. I was warned that it may need tuning and playing with once I'm on a wet circuit or skid pan but on it's most intrusive setting it worked really well, if anything I think it could probably do to be a little more intrusive for a true "nanny mode" but I was pretty impressed.
Rather than just cutting fuel when it detects slip, it's got a gradual way of pulling timing and trying to bring you into the slip target smoothly. The fuel cut only comes in if you're really rough with it, but without the telltale on the dash you wouldn't even know it was triggering half of the time - very impressive. On some of the intermediate settings you could still get a bit of slip and allowed you to really lean on the throttle in the slower corners whilst still feeling like a bit of a hero. Thumbs up ECUMaster for that one, it just works.
The rain was on and off all morning, but over lunch the sun came out and the track started drying out. By 15:30 or so it was completely dry, but still pretty slippy particularly around Church (going onto the back straight) and the final corner where there's a new piece of tarmac which feels like wet glass.
Pace ramped up, and ZZRs went on around 3pm ish. Dampers got stiffened up the session after that and the last couple of hours were fantastic fun.
Uneventful lap, this was about as dry as it got. Still pretty slippery, but could lean on it in a couple of places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pxBsO6UqI&ab...
The day finished with a completely empty fuel tank (put 41litres into a 38litre tank when I limped to Menai Bridge!)
Car didn't get through completely unscathed, lambda sensor (yes, the new one I've only just bought) died after 2 sessions so the car was over fuelling a fair bit to compensate. Meant a few dash warnings through the day but it didn't really spoil the fun, probably a bit down on power.
Still loads more to come from Anglesey though, it's quickly becoming a favourite and there's loads of time to be had there on a properly dry day. Bring on 2022.
Since mid-summer I've felt like my gearbox was getting noisy. Only when coasting, it would rattle - and dipping the clutch and/or applying any throttle load at all would silence it. I'd made a decision around September time to get the box back out of the car over winter and send it for an inspection. It's obviously been running fine, surviving a fair few trackdays this year - but I wanted to protect my investment and make sure I wasn't going to grenade it due to something silly that may have occurred during the last rebuild.
This week I got my car up on the ramp and started mentally preparing myself to take the gearbox out again. It's really not a bad job, just time consuming and not something I wanted to be doing again so soon.
With the car up in the air, I had a good waggle around of everything and found a fair bit of play in the crossgate shift linkage. Grabbing it and giving a shake gave a very metallic rattle, could this be the cause of my noise rather than something internal to the box?!
Luckily it's pretty accessible, so took the offending parts off the car and had a look.
At the end of the crossgate lever is a large round pin, this goes into a plastic bush which "converts it" to a rectangular shape where it then sits in a slot on the shift rod itself coming out of the gearbox. This plastic bush slides in the slot during gear changes, and the circular pin rotates within the bush too - so it's got an opportunity to wear from both directions.
Bad photo, but you can see metal on metal contact at the 12 and 6 oclock position on the pin where the zinc plating has worn off.
Luckily these parts seem to be available from Toyota for not a lot of money, but I wanted a way to try and test the theory to decide whether or not the box would still be coming out. I took the pin and covered it with some heatshrink to pad out the 'slop' in the bush.
I can't see this lasting more than a few gear changes, but hopefully it would last long enough for me to see if the rattle had subsided.
Bolted it back up followed by a quick test drive... and it's a LOT quieter. There's no perceptible rattle anymore in 1, 2, 5 or 6. 3 and 4 have a slight soundtrack on overrun but it's not a rattle and I suspect it's more the semi-helical nature of the stronger gears I have in those slots. It's not unpleasant, it's not worrying and I don't think anyone would notice it if their senses weren't on overdrive.
For now I'm relieved, maybe "carefully optimistic" is a good term but I won't be rushing to drop the box out anytime soon after this discovery. I'll refurbish the linkage with new bushes, and I may consider some of the gucci billet linkage options that the US community seem to love. It replaces a few of the plastic/metal interfaces with proper bearings and rosejoints etc although annoyingly the round:square bush that I've found here is still part of that setup.
That freed up some motivation to get cracking on with a small pile of parts I've been sitting on for most of the year. I've been modifying my car so far to give as much reliability and longevity as possible but other than gaining a few ponies from the ECU and remap, I've not pushed power on at all despite having a platform now that I think/hope can take a bit more.
The car doesn't need to be any faster, on track it's got a lovely balance of grip to power where it still feels like I can lean on it and be a bit clumsy without it biting me... but I can't shake the feeling that there's some untapped potential in it.
First up, injectors. I can see my current 440cc injectors are getting close to max duty and can't keep up with any more boost. I'd been wanting some specific injectors for a while from Injector Dynamics but UK supply was just not available. When my fuel pump had an issue in the summer I bought some FiveO motorsport injectors to rule out an injector issue, but never ended up using them - so they got sold on. I then got in touch with a Lotus owner in the US who had bought some of the ID injectors and found them too small(!) for his build, so he kindly shipped them over to me.
They're ID XDS1050s, massively over gunned for what I need but they're now the smallest that ID make because they're so confident in their low load pulse control, they found the 750's they used to do are now redundant. I'm a big fan of ID injectors since tinkering with my Subaru, it's amazing what difference a quality set of injectors with real and accurate data can make to the low load driveability of a tweaked car - so hoping for the same from these.
Along with fitting the injectors, I've revised the fuel rail plumbing a little bit. Earlier in summer my fuel pump had a partial failure which meant I was running on only 1 bar of fuel pressure, enough to limp home but the engine/ECU had no way of knowing about the fault. The ECUMaster ECU has fuel pressure compensation strategies available, so by adding a fuel pressure sensor I can both inform myself of any future issues but also increase my odds of limping the car home safely if needed.
The least intrusive way of adding a 1/8npt takeoff for a sensor was to replace the flexible fuel hose that connects the rail to the hard line going to the pump. By converting to AN-6 fittings, it opens up a world of adaptors and fittings to make it work. I robbed the idea from an off-the-shelf replacement pipe from Radium Engineering, but I needed a slight alteration due to my catch cans blocking the route.
The analogue gauge is temporary just to help me calibrate the digital sensor that will replace it. Also got an "ultra flow" 90deg elbow coming too to properly radius the bend and prevent any pressure drops after the gauge.
You can just about make out the pipe run here, plenty of slack to allow for engine movement and nicely circumnavigates the catchcans.
Observant will notice a missing header tank, I barely touched the fkin thing and a take-off snapped off of it. Grrr
Once I get a header tank replacement, I'll get the car idled and finetuned on the new injectors to at least allow me to limp it to a mapper for a proper setup. Oh, and we'll need to arrange for some boost increases before that time too, so smaller pulley will be arranged.
This week I got my car up on the ramp and started mentally preparing myself to take the gearbox out again. It's really not a bad job, just time consuming and not something I wanted to be doing again so soon.
With the car up in the air, I had a good waggle around of everything and found a fair bit of play in the crossgate shift linkage. Grabbing it and giving a shake gave a very metallic rattle, could this be the cause of my noise rather than something internal to the box?!
Luckily it's pretty accessible, so took the offending parts off the car and had a look.
At the end of the crossgate lever is a large round pin, this goes into a plastic bush which "converts it" to a rectangular shape where it then sits in a slot on the shift rod itself coming out of the gearbox. This plastic bush slides in the slot during gear changes, and the circular pin rotates within the bush too - so it's got an opportunity to wear from both directions.
Bad photo, but you can see metal on metal contact at the 12 and 6 oclock position on the pin where the zinc plating has worn off.
Luckily these parts seem to be available from Toyota for not a lot of money, but I wanted a way to try and test the theory to decide whether or not the box would still be coming out. I took the pin and covered it with some heatshrink to pad out the 'slop' in the bush.
I can't see this lasting more than a few gear changes, but hopefully it would last long enough for me to see if the rattle had subsided.
Bolted it back up followed by a quick test drive... and it's a LOT quieter. There's no perceptible rattle anymore in 1, 2, 5 or 6. 3 and 4 have a slight soundtrack on overrun but it's not a rattle and I suspect it's more the semi-helical nature of the stronger gears I have in those slots. It's not unpleasant, it's not worrying and I don't think anyone would notice it if their senses weren't on overdrive.
For now I'm relieved, maybe "carefully optimistic" is a good term but I won't be rushing to drop the box out anytime soon after this discovery. I'll refurbish the linkage with new bushes, and I may consider some of the gucci billet linkage options that the US community seem to love. It replaces a few of the plastic/metal interfaces with proper bearings and rosejoints etc although annoyingly the round:square bush that I've found here is still part of that setup.
That freed up some motivation to get cracking on with a small pile of parts I've been sitting on for most of the year. I've been modifying my car so far to give as much reliability and longevity as possible but other than gaining a few ponies from the ECU and remap, I've not pushed power on at all despite having a platform now that I think/hope can take a bit more.
The car doesn't need to be any faster, on track it's got a lovely balance of grip to power where it still feels like I can lean on it and be a bit clumsy without it biting me... but I can't shake the feeling that there's some untapped potential in it.
First up, injectors. I can see my current 440cc injectors are getting close to max duty and can't keep up with any more boost. I'd been wanting some specific injectors for a while from Injector Dynamics but UK supply was just not available. When my fuel pump had an issue in the summer I bought some FiveO motorsport injectors to rule out an injector issue, but never ended up using them - so they got sold on. I then got in touch with a Lotus owner in the US who had bought some of the ID injectors and found them too small(!) for his build, so he kindly shipped them over to me.
They're ID XDS1050s, massively over gunned for what I need but they're now the smallest that ID make because they're so confident in their low load pulse control, they found the 750's they used to do are now redundant. I'm a big fan of ID injectors since tinkering with my Subaru, it's amazing what difference a quality set of injectors with real and accurate data can make to the low load driveability of a tweaked car - so hoping for the same from these.
Along with fitting the injectors, I've revised the fuel rail plumbing a little bit. Earlier in summer my fuel pump had a partial failure which meant I was running on only 1 bar of fuel pressure, enough to limp home but the engine/ECU had no way of knowing about the fault. The ECUMaster ECU has fuel pressure compensation strategies available, so by adding a fuel pressure sensor I can both inform myself of any future issues but also increase my odds of limping the car home safely if needed.
The least intrusive way of adding a 1/8npt takeoff for a sensor was to replace the flexible fuel hose that connects the rail to the hard line going to the pump. By converting to AN-6 fittings, it opens up a world of adaptors and fittings to make it work. I robbed the idea from an off-the-shelf replacement pipe from Radium Engineering, but I needed a slight alteration due to my catch cans blocking the route.
The analogue gauge is temporary just to help me calibrate the digital sensor that will replace it. Also got an "ultra flow" 90deg elbow coming too to properly radius the bend and prevent any pressure drops after the gauge.
You can just about make out the pipe run here, plenty of slack to allow for engine movement and nicely circumnavigates the catchcans.
Observant will notice a missing header tank, I barely touched the fkin thing and a take-off snapped off of it. Grrr
Once I get a header tank replacement, I'll get the car idled and finetuned on the new injectors to at least allow me to limp it to a mapper for a proper setup. Oh, and we'll need to arrange for some boost increases before that time too, so smaller pulley will be arranged.
Wee bit of progress, while I had the chargecooler off and a few other bits out of the way I whipped my cam cover off for what's turning into an annual check of lobe wear and valve clearances. All still within spec, happy days.
That then gave me an opportunity to swap for a blinged up cam cover that was kindly donated to the project.
Fitted some new seals/gaskets to that and gave it a good clean out - blowing some oil through the cam squirter lines and make sure it was all flowing freely and without dust.
My Toyota replacement header tank was next to arrive, was in better nick than the eBay photos suggested it would be and it cleaned up a treat.
Looks like it's been subject to much less UV abuse than mine
Then was the new bushes for my crossgate linkage. This has definitely tightened things up a bit, but you can still feel where the rocking motion comes from as the parts are just not in tight enough tolerance. I'll see if this is enough to fix/hide my coasting rattle but I fear I'm already falling down the rabbit hole of linkage upgrades. We'll see.
With everything buttoned back up, I then had the job of making sure the car would run on the new injectors. It's a pretty dry topic but I've been enjoying learning. Oh, and I fitted Lambda sensor #5... thanks Feirny.
The EMU fuelling model allows for setting up the injector parameters with fuel pressure compensations/corrections which means that the underlying fuelling VE table can be mapped independently of fuel hardware changes (in theory). Because my car went to RRR with unknown injectors and since the 2ZZ has no pressure sensor from factory, they were limited to what they could do here - so all of the work was done in the VE table. Nothing wrong with that, car obviously has been running fine but you can get a more accurate picture of things if you add in a fuel pressure sensor and set things up 'properly', which is what I intend to do.
The 2ZZ operates a dead head fuel rail so there's no rising rate FPR like I'm used to from faffing around with Subarus. It makes things a little more complex to get my little head around, but effectively the base pressure (4bar in my case) will either be assisted by manifold pressure in vacuum (so effective pressure goes up a bit during idle) or is pushed back by boost pressure, so the effective pressure drops during "pulls". Using some injector flow data comparisons provided by ID, you can then map in a correction table to compensate for this so that your fuelling will always be "right" and your VE table setup regardless of conditions. If you then had a fuel pump issue which was reducing your base fuel pressure (such as the issue I had at Blyton earlier in the year) then the ECU would know about this, could throw a warning and stick the car into limp mode whilst compensating the fuelling - allowing me to limp home with a safe level of AFR.
In the real world it'll make very little difference, but it's just another case of me having functionality from the standalone ECU - so I want to use it.
So far I've just got it idling right and everything has gone to plan. Car fires right up and idles bang on AFR target. I still need to finalise the wiring for my pressure sensor as it's bodged in at the moment, so I'll sort that this week then I can go out and make sure the corrections are working with a bit of load on the system.
I Still intend to get it mapped properly on a dyno, but hoping I can get myself 90% of the way there with the tools I have at my disposal.
That then gave me an opportunity to swap for a blinged up cam cover that was kindly donated to the project.
Fitted some new seals/gaskets to that and gave it a good clean out - blowing some oil through the cam squirter lines and make sure it was all flowing freely and without dust.
My Toyota replacement header tank was next to arrive, was in better nick than the eBay photos suggested it would be and it cleaned up a treat.
Looks like it's been subject to much less UV abuse than mine
Then was the new bushes for my crossgate linkage. This has definitely tightened things up a bit, but you can still feel where the rocking motion comes from as the parts are just not in tight enough tolerance. I'll see if this is enough to fix/hide my coasting rattle but I fear I'm already falling down the rabbit hole of linkage upgrades. We'll see.
With everything buttoned back up, I then had the job of making sure the car would run on the new injectors. It's a pretty dry topic but I've been enjoying learning. Oh, and I fitted Lambda sensor #5... thanks Feirny.
The EMU fuelling model allows for setting up the injector parameters with fuel pressure compensations/corrections which means that the underlying fuelling VE table can be mapped independently of fuel hardware changes (in theory). Because my car went to RRR with unknown injectors and since the 2ZZ has no pressure sensor from factory, they were limited to what they could do here - so all of the work was done in the VE table. Nothing wrong with that, car obviously has been running fine but you can get a more accurate picture of things if you add in a fuel pressure sensor and set things up 'properly', which is what I intend to do.
The 2ZZ operates a dead head fuel rail so there's no rising rate FPR like I'm used to from faffing around with Subarus. It makes things a little more complex to get my little head around, but effectively the base pressure (4bar in my case) will either be assisted by manifold pressure in vacuum (so effective pressure goes up a bit during idle) or is pushed back by boost pressure, so the effective pressure drops during "pulls". Using some injector flow data comparisons provided by ID, you can then map in a correction table to compensate for this so that your fuelling will always be "right" and your VE table setup regardless of conditions. If you then had a fuel pump issue which was reducing your base fuel pressure (such as the issue I had at Blyton earlier in the year) then the ECU would know about this, could throw a warning and stick the car into limp mode whilst compensating the fuelling - allowing me to limp home with a safe level of AFR.
In the real world it'll make very little difference, but it's just another case of me having functionality from the standalone ECU - so I want to use it.
So far I've just got it idling right and everything has gone to plan. Car fires right up and idles bang on AFR target. I still need to finalise the wiring for my pressure sensor as it's bodged in at the moment, so I'll sort that this week then I can go out and make sure the corrections are working with a bit of load on the system.
I Still intend to get it mapped properly on a dyno, but hoping I can get myself 90% of the way there with the tools I have at my disposal.
Overdue an update, lots of boring tinkering involving the fuel pressure sensor and the DIY map tweaks to get it running alright at low load/cruise. Summary is, pressure sensor is now in and reporting to the ECU which means the ECU now has a reading of what the effective fuel pressure is across the injectors (baseline fuel pressure - manifold pressure). I even made a wire.
The only real advantage of this is error checking, if I have a problem with fuel pressure now (such as I did at Blyton last year), the ECU will notify me of this (along with a soft RPM limit to limp me home) and it will also over compensate at the injector to make sure my limp home still is fuelling the car healthily. In theory the fuelling calculations would happen a bit more efficiently too, but that's never going to be noticeable by anything measurable. It also changes the 'shape' of the VE Table considerably, as it no longer needs to add fuel as part of the table as manifold pressure goes up, it looks less like a hill and more like a plateau.
With all this extra fuelling capacity, I next needed to consume some of it - so on went a 2.9" SC pulley from Seriously Lotus. It's Seriously Light too, less than half the weight of the original.
I estimated that the pulley would be worth approx. 3psi of extra boost, taking me from 7ish to 10ish. That's not an insignificant proportion but it's well considered that the Lotus pulley size is already getting close to the maximum from the blower in terms of diminishing returns. That said, with a capable fuelling system, programmable ECU and critically the chargecooler from Pro Alloy - I thought I had as good a chance as anybody to get some decent results out of it. I'd decided up front that if the gains just weren't there to be made, or were barely perceptible that I would revert back to stock boost as I was more than happy with it.
Getting hold of a mapper with some dyno time was proving quite difficult, I put a fair bit of work into the map myself to get it into a cruisable state which worked out pretty well. The car got me safely and reliably to Silverstone for an experience day but it was clear to see that any attempt to breath on the throttle was taking my map into uncharted territory.
I had to change cranking fuel too, one of the only parts of the fuelling calculation that's not proportional to injector size is the cranking fuel - so my new much bigger injectors were just flooding the cylinders on a hot start. Easy fix.
Expecting to cancel my final trackday of the year (Bedford next Monday) and retire the car for a few months until it could be mapped properly, I got an opportunity out of the blue to jump on a mapping session with Chris @ EFI Parts in Runcorn. He was going to map a friends S3 Elise Cup in the early afternoon, and he had time in the late afternoon to take a look at mine. Chris wasn't really on my radar, but I did know of one other person who had a 2ZZ Lotus mapped there fairly recently and he gave a good impression, so off I went.
The aforementioned S3 Cup car had a factory mounted chargecooler and it struggled for IATs for much of the session, despite it being bloody freezing outside. This gave me something to worry about, would my setup be able to cope with the extra pressure at load? (Spoiler alert, it coped).
I had a long chat with Chris about everything I'd configured and so he spent some time going over my fuel pressure delta corrections etc, and familiarised himself with my map in general. I made explicit effort to not come across as a know-it-all busybody, but I wanted Chris to know what I'd been cocking about with so that he wasn't building on a dodgy foundation. Generally he seemed happy with my tweaks though, and he was a gent at explaining things as we went along, helping me learn (a lot!) as we went.
Immediately it was clear that my DIY map was fine for cruising, but any attempt to apply load put you into an area of the timing map that wasn't previously used (because of boost coming in at different levels/times etc) so had I attempted to drive my car hard with "my" map, it would have quickly ended in tears.
Chris spent some time getting the low lift cam part of the map all dialled in, moving the cam switchover point way up to 6k RPM and only doing pulls up to that point. Played with cam timing a bit, and gave himself a few references as to where power was made, and where it started tailing off so we could pick the optimal point to swing over onto the high lift cam. Early signs that the car would produce a decent number came at this point, when it made 216bhp (flywheel) on the low lift cam at 6k RPM.
Once Chris had a catalogue of low-cam runs to pick from, he reversed the process and brought the cam switch over point in early, to experiment at "that side" of the fence too. With all that done, he could piece together what worked well and where, to come up with the final cam profile. Cam switch has come forward a couple hundred RPM as a result of this, it's now 4700rpm from 4900rpm.
Power delivery was still lumpy at this point, as I could see from the graphs - so Chris spent the next few pulls smoothing everything out. IATs were bang on, they rose roughly in line with RPMs on the pulls and then recovered to their resting 20degrees-ish within a few seconds. Back to back runs were no problem, and power figures very consistent between runs. How it'll compare to a 30degree evening at Donington? We'll find out one day.
With the power runs done, a lot of work was then put in to part throttle and transient conditions - I found this very interesting to watch from the sidelines, as I was aware of a few situations that could "catch out" my previous map, causing it to stumble for a moment. Nothing major, and nothing a lot of people would notice probably - but still it was encouraging to watch Chris try to unpick these scenarios. Acceleration enrichment needed a fair bit of fuel compared to the old map, not sure if that's an injector characteristic thing or just because the SC spins up so quickly (or both?!).
One of my complaints about this car since the very day I bought it (standard ECU) was the "return to idle", often it would coast down to a stall when slowing for some lights for example. Adding the ECUMaster ECU "fixed" this to a certain degree, by throwing loads of correction mechanisms at it, but the more you correct it, the clumsier the car would feel at low load due to slow falling RPM and stuff like that. I mentioned this and Chris spent a bit of time going through this too, he pointed out an architectural limitation of my particular setup in that the DBW throttle has a huge area/volume of manifold pressure between it and the inlet manifold itself. Any attempts to correct idle using the DBW throttle results in a latency, so you either have to deal with oscillations - or add enough margin in it to make the car feel slow to respond.
I'm still not entirely sure what Chris did, and how he did it - but he's essentially pegged the TB to a relatively static level and is using ignition timing to control the fall to idle now, and the results are fantastic. It's easily the best this car has felt, much better than OE and even my best attempts to tweak it on the previous iterations of my map weren't quite this good. I've had very little time in the car since, and I get the feeling it might need massaging a bit at a few different operating temperatures etc but once I can reverse engineer what he's done, I feel pretty happy about tweaking this as needed.
I'm sure Chris would have preferred to have the car over night to look at cold start/warmup enrichment stuff, but I had to get off - so we called it a day. I can take care of a lot of the cold start stuff if it needs tweaks, but early impressions look good.
Anyway, onto the figure. The number everyone pretends doesn't mean anything but secretly it's all they're bothered about.
In terms of the number itself, it's about what can be expected from my hardware. So difficult to get an accurate idea, as there have been some rather optimistic claims made about what this 2ZZ/MP62 setup can achieve over the years - but I think this is about in line.
For reference my previous dyno on standard boost/injectors made 279bhp and 176talks. I always viewed that as the higher end of what the stock system could do, I've seen many (many!) maps from various 2ZZ Cars over the last year or so from other community members and my RRR map always jumped out as being fairly aggressive on both fuel and timing. Obviously that never caused me any issues, car took everything I threw at it but since I was now running more boost, this was an opportunity to relax things off a bit.
On the EFI map I'm now running ~11.80 AFR right at the top end (slopes gradually down from around 12.3) and running around 22degrees of advance. On the RRR map it was closer to 12.50 AFR at the top end and 28degrees of advance.
Chris did push the timing a bit more, and we did make a little bit more power - but it was well into diminishing returns and as the car would be used for lots of track time, rather an extra degrees or two of knock margin than 3-4bhp so we pulled it back.
Numbers are one thing, but I wasn't going to judge success until I could see if it felt appreciably quicker. If it didn't, I'd go back to standard boost and my old map... borrowing a few of Chris' idle tweaks along the way. The drive home was freezing and torrential rain, so I barely got above 4k RPM but I finally got some miles on the car in some dry spells this week.
Early impressions are very strong, car undoubtedly feels quicker particularly before cam lift. Feels like there's an added bit of surge here, and traction has been a bit of a concern as a result. Beyond cam switch, the changeover feels smooth but I'm sure it sounds louder... can't work that out, maybe I'm just hyper sensitive to all noises/sensations during early testing - but it sounds good.
At the top end the car is ballistic, but then - it was before. It's definitely quicker and I would easily believe that it's making an extra 20bhp based on bum dyno. Away from the full throttle pulls, the car feels nicer to drive just about everywhere, responsiveness coming off the throttle is much better, as Chris lowered the fuel cut threshold (I believe RRR kept injectors going at much higher RPM as an attempt to "catch" falling revs due to the aforementioned idle issues).
Provisionally then, I'm happy. Feels like a lot of the work I've done to make the car more reliable and able to handle a bit more power is now justified - so hopefully it all works nicely together and I have a good year on track next year. I'm realistically at the limit of what the current hardware can do IMO, bigger/better superchargers are available and the 2ZZ head can/will respond well to a bit of work - but ultimately I've always got the gearbox skulking in the shadows.
The only real advantage of this is error checking, if I have a problem with fuel pressure now (such as I did at Blyton last year), the ECU will notify me of this (along with a soft RPM limit to limp me home) and it will also over compensate at the injector to make sure my limp home still is fuelling the car healthily. In theory the fuelling calculations would happen a bit more efficiently too, but that's never going to be noticeable by anything measurable. It also changes the 'shape' of the VE Table considerably, as it no longer needs to add fuel as part of the table as manifold pressure goes up, it looks less like a hill and more like a plateau.
With all this extra fuelling capacity, I next needed to consume some of it - so on went a 2.9" SC pulley from Seriously Lotus. It's Seriously Light too, less than half the weight of the original.
I estimated that the pulley would be worth approx. 3psi of extra boost, taking me from 7ish to 10ish. That's not an insignificant proportion but it's well considered that the Lotus pulley size is already getting close to the maximum from the blower in terms of diminishing returns. That said, with a capable fuelling system, programmable ECU and critically the chargecooler from Pro Alloy - I thought I had as good a chance as anybody to get some decent results out of it. I'd decided up front that if the gains just weren't there to be made, or were barely perceptible that I would revert back to stock boost as I was more than happy with it.
Getting hold of a mapper with some dyno time was proving quite difficult, I put a fair bit of work into the map myself to get it into a cruisable state which worked out pretty well. The car got me safely and reliably to Silverstone for an experience day but it was clear to see that any attempt to breath on the throttle was taking my map into uncharted territory.
I had to change cranking fuel too, one of the only parts of the fuelling calculation that's not proportional to injector size is the cranking fuel - so my new much bigger injectors were just flooding the cylinders on a hot start. Easy fix.
Expecting to cancel my final trackday of the year (Bedford next Monday) and retire the car for a few months until it could be mapped properly, I got an opportunity out of the blue to jump on a mapping session with Chris @ EFI Parts in Runcorn. He was going to map a friends S3 Elise Cup in the early afternoon, and he had time in the late afternoon to take a look at mine. Chris wasn't really on my radar, but I did know of one other person who had a 2ZZ Lotus mapped there fairly recently and he gave a good impression, so off I went.
The aforementioned S3 Cup car had a factory mounted chargecooler and it struggled for IATs for much of the session, despite it being bloody freezing outside. This gave me something to worry about, would my setup be able to cope with the extra pressure at load? (Spoiler alert, it coped).
I had a long chat with Chris about everything I'd configured and so he spent some time going over my fuel pressure delta corrections etc, and familiarised himself with my map in general. I made explicit effort to not come across as a know-it-all busybody, but I wanted Chris to know what I'd been cocking about with so that he wasn't building on a dodgy foundation. Generally he seemed happy with my tweaks though, and he was a gent at explaining things as we went along, helping me learn (a lot!) as we went.
Immediately it was clear that my DIY map was fine for cruising, but any attempt to apply load put you into an area of the timing map that wasn't previously used (because of boost coming in at different levels/times etc) so had I attempted to drive my car hard with "my" map, it would have quickly ended in tears.
Chris spent some time getting the low lift cam part of the map all dialled in, moving the cam switchover point way up to 6k RPM and only doing pulls up to that point. Played with cam timing a bit, and gave himself a few references as to where power was made, and where it started tailing off so we could pick the optimal point to swing over onto the high lift cam. Early signs that the car would produce a decent number came at this point, when it made 216bhp (flywheel) on the low lift cam at 6k RPM.
Once Chris had a catalogue of low-cam runs to pick from, he reversed the process and brought the cam switch over point in early, to experiment at "that side" of the fence too. With all that done, he could piece together what worked well and where, to come up with the final cam profile. Cam switch has come forward a couple hundred RPM as a result of this, it's now 4700rpm from 4900rpm.
Power delivery was still lumpy at this point, as I could see from the graphs - so Chris spent the next few pulls smoothing everything out. IATs were bang on, they rose roughly in line with RPMs on the pulls and then recovered to their resting 20degrees-ish within a few seconds. Back to back runs were no problem, and power figures very consistent between runs. How it'll compare to a 30degree evening at Donington? We'll find out one day.
With the power runs done, a lot of work was then put in to part throttle and transient conditions - I found this very interesting to watch from the sidelines, as I was aware of a few situations that could "catch out" my previous map, causing it to stumble for a moment. Nothing major, and nothing a lot of people would notice probably - but still it was encouraging to watch Chris try to unpick these scenarios. Acceleration enrichment needed a fair bit of fuel compared to the old map, not sure if that's an injector characteristic thing or just because the SC spins up so quickly (or both?!).
One of my complaints about this car since the very day I bought it (standard ECU) was the "return to idle", often it would coast down to a stall when slowing for some lights for example. Adding the ECUMaster ECU "fixed" this to a certain degree, by throwing loads of correction mechanisms at it, but the more you correct it, the clumsier the car would feel at low load due to slow falling RPM and stuff like that. I mentioned this and Chris spent a bit of time going through this too, he pointed out an architectural limitation of my particular setup in that the DBW throttle has a huge area/volume of manifold pressure between it and the inlet manifold itself. Any attempts to correct idle using the DBW throttle results in a latency, so you either have to deal with oscillations - or add enough margin in it to make the car feel slow to respond.
I'm still not entirely sure what Chris did, and how he did it - but he's essentially pegged the TB to a relatively static level and is using ignition timing to control the fall to idle now, and the results are fantastic. It's easily the best this car has felt, much better than OE and even my best attempts to tweak it on the previous iterations of my map weren't quite this good. I've had very little time in the car since, and I get the feeling it might need massaging a bit at a few different operating temperatures etc but once I can reverse engineer what he's done, I feel pretty happy about tweaking this as needed.
I'm sure Chris would have preferred to have the car over night to look at cold start/warmup enrichment stuff, but I had to get off - so we called it a day. I can take care of a lot of the cold start stuff if it needs tweaks, but early impressions look good.
Anyway, onto the figure. The number everyone pretends doesn't mean anything but secretly it's all they're bothered about.
In terms of the number itself, it's about what can be expected from my hardware. So difficult to get an accurate idea, as there have been some rather optimistic claims made about what this 2ZZ/MP62 setup can achieve over the years - but I think this is about in line.
For reference my previous dyno on standard boost/injectors made 279bhp and 176talks. I always viewed that as the higher end of what the stock system could do, I've seen many (many!) maps from various 2ZZ Cars over the last year or so from other community members and my RRR map always jumped out as being fairly aggressive on both fuel and timing. Obviously that never caused me any issues, car took everything I threw at it but since I was now running more boost, this was an opportunity to relax things off a bit.
On the EFI map I'm now running ~11.80 AFR right at the top end (slopes gradually down from around 12.3) and running around 22degrees of advance. On the RRR map it was closer to 12.50 AFR at the top end and 28degrees of advance.
Chris did push the timing a bit more, and we did make a little bit more power - but it was well into diminishing returns and as the car would be used for lots of track time, rather an extra degrees or two of knock margin than 3-4bhp so we pulled it back.
Numbers are one thing, but I wasn't going to judge success until I could see if it felt appreciably quicker. If it didn't, I'd go back to standard boost and my old map... borrowing a few of Chris' idle tweaks along the way. The drive home was freezing and torrential rain, so I barely got above 4k RPM but I finally got some miles on the car in some dry spells this week.
Early impressions are very strong, car undoubtedly feels quicker particularly before cam lift. Feels like there's an added bit of surge here, and traction has been a bit of a concern as a result. Beyond cam switch, the changeover feels smooth but I'm sure it sounds louder... can't work that out, maybe I'm just hyper sensitive to all noises/sensations during early testing - but it sounds good.
At the top end the car is ballistic, but then - it was before. It's definitely quicker and I would easily believe that it's making an extra 20bhp based on bum dyno. Away from the full throttle pulls, the car feels nicer to drive just about everywhere, responsiveness coming off the throttle is much better, as Chris lowered the fuel cut threshold (I believe RRR kept injectors going at much higher RPM as an attempt to "catch" falling revs due to the aforementioned idle issues).
Provisionally then, I'm happy. Feels like a lot of the work I've done to make the car more reliable and able to handle a bit more power is now justified - so hopefully it all works nicely together and I have a good year on track next year. I'm realistically at the limit of what the current hardware can do IMO, bigger/better superchargers are available and the 2ZZ head can/will respond well to a bit of work - but ultimately I've always got the gearbox skulking in the shadows.
Final trackday of the year and my first visit to Bedford Autodrome.
With the weather forecast and the recent changes to my car, this was only ever going to be a data logging session really - but it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Temp was low single figures, track was wet all day including a fair bit of standing water over lunch. With the time of year and forecast in mind, I didn't even consider going with my ZZR clad forged wheels, and instead went for the AD08RS I had fitted to my spares earlier in the year, making it my first full trackday on a non ZZR tyre.
Car ran great all day, limited periods of full throttle application due to the conditions, but also I was tripping the driveby sound meters. This is new for me, my car has always fallen well under the limits but the Bedford ones are particularly strict (87.5db driveby I think). My car has allegedly got a little bit louder according to bystanders, comparable to V6's which I find a little hard to believe so I need to figure out if this is just a by-product of running a bit more power, or is something amiss with my exhaust system.
Once I was politely instructed on the areas I needed to cruise around, I had a lot of fun. Car pulls like a train once it finally grips up, and showed no signs of slowing up when I needed to start the gentle preparation for the braking zones (easily locking up on the brakes, so had to take it steady). AD08 tyres heated up nicely and showed no signs of aquaplaning in the standing water, actually felt like I had more grip on the "properly wet" sessions rather than the damp ones towards the end of the day. Thoroughly impressed with them
The circuit encourages a playful nature, so my laps were largely cruising through the "loud" sections, and playing around at low speed in the tighter turns to move the car around a bit. Trying to imagine the place in the dry and it must be incredibly quick. The chicane between the two main straights was wide open and I imagine you can tip into there at a fair lick, 140+ must be easily doable in the dry which is terrifying in a car I've bolted together myself.
Can't wait to go back, not sure if I can squeeze it into the calendar for next year as it's already looking rammed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFa6cOJWIo&ab...
Short clip showing a more sedate/playful attempt at a lap, including my first ever trackday spin... yes, really :|
With the weather forecast and the recent changes to my car, this was only ever going to be a data logging session really - but it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Temp was low single figures, track was wet all day including a fair bit of standing water over lunch. With the time of year and forecast in mind, I didn't even consider going with my ZZR clad forged wheels, and instead went for the AD08RS I had fitted to my spares earlier in the year, making it my first full trackday on a non ZZR tyre.
Car ran great all day, limited periods of full throttle application due to the conditions, but also I was tripping the driveby sound meters. This is new for me, my car has always fallen well under the limits but the Bedford ones are particularly strict (87.5db driveby I think). My car has allegedly got a little bit louder according to bystanders, comparable to V6's which I find a little hard to believe so I need to figure out if this is just a by-product of running a bit more power, or is something amiss with my exhaust system.
Once I was politely instructed on the areas I needed to cruise around, I had a lot of fun. Car pulls like a train once it finally grips up, and showed no signs of slowing up when I needed to start the gentle preparation for the braking zones (easily locking up on the brakes, so had to take it steady). AD08 tyres heated up nicely and showed no signs of aquaplaning in the standing water, actually felt like I had more grip on the "properly wet" sessions rather than the damp ones towards the end of the day. Thoroughly impressed with them
The circuit encourages a playful nature, so my laps were largely cruising through the "loud" sections, and playing around at low speed in the tighter turns to move the car around a bit. Trying to imagine the place in the dry and it must be incredibly quick. The chicane between the two main straights was wide open and I imagine you can tip into there at a fair lick, 140+ must be easily doable in the dry which is terrifying in a car I've bolted together myself.
Can't wait to go back, not sure if I can squeeze it into the calendar for next year as it's already looking rammed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFa6cOJWIo&ab...
Short clip showing a more sedate/playful attempt at a lap, including my first ever trackday spin... yes, really :|
Bedford is one of my closest tracks and I'm often there, let me know when you plan to go! It's great fun despite the flatness of it.
One of my vids there, best time for me so far is in the 2:43s I think.
https://youtu.be/4jstaAPEmuM
One of my vids there, best time for me so far is in the 2:43s I think.
https://youtu.be/4jstaAPEmuM
honda_exige said:
Bedford is one of my closest tracks and I'm often there, let me know when you plan to go! It's great fun despite the flatness of it.
One of my vids there, best time for me so far is in the 2:43s I think.
https://youtu.be/4jstaAPEmuM
Aye I guessed you must be local, I bet I wasn't far off a minute slower than that on Monday One of my vids there, best time for me so far is in the 2:43s I think.
https://youtu.be/4jstaAPEmuM
Saying that, I'm still not exactly sure where the start/finish is, nor where the bloody thing goes. 4+ miles takes a lot of learning!On the first session a fella in front of me literally pulled up and gave way half way down the second straight, not sure whether to carry on going or pull onto one of the alternate layouts
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