Would a re-map negate the need for a pedal box?
No, two different things.
For the ultimate rush, add some power with a Stage1 box/remap and then chuck the pedal box on for more instant whooooosh
Well, now, for the last goodness knows how many years I've been saying exactly the same thing fredgroves.
But then, only very recently I was taken down a few pegs by Rick at Unicorn Motor Developments fairly recently when I basically told him he was talking rubbish (as you do).
Rewind a few years, as I tend to waffle on a bit you might want to skip to the bottom, I was speaking to Kev at REVO when I'd taken possession of my mk6 GTI in 2009 and was discussing pedal response and throttle mapping as that was one area I'd been less than happy with on my mk5 GTI remap that was done by another company. I'd previously had REVO on an older 1.8t GTI which had the responses of a cat getting a nasty shock so was keen to bring back a bit of life into the pedal response of a mapped mk6 GTI.
On a stage 1 car, particularly a GTI which as a low pressure turbo that spools up really low down in the range you go from zero boost to rather a lot of boost very quickly which can mean a bit of an on/off response at low revs (which is rather a lot of the time in real world conditions). You notice it less on a standard car (until you get a mk7) due to the more progressive boost build up.
Anyway, I duly took one of the very first mk6 GTI REVO maps and it was great.
But I still wasn't quite happy with the initial pedal response.
Don't get me wrong, the car went like a rocket. It's forte was motorway on ramps. Hell, it was so good you'd be tempted to come off every slip road, shimmy round the roundabout at the bottom and blast up the on ramp on every single motorway junction on your journey!!
I spoke to Kev again and he said the mapping was as responsive as he could get it and any initial pedal lag was just inherent in the fly by wire design.
I then discovered, via another forum member, the joys of a SprintBooster.
Nirvana restored.
The SprintBooster came with me to my next mk6 GTI and then when my mk7 GTI finally arrived in mid/late 2013 I got an unpleasant shock. The throttle response was significantly worse again (yes, I'm a fusspot when it comes to my cars) and SprintBooster at the time had no fitment for a mk7 GTI.
Darn and blast.
It didn't take me very long to find the DTUK/DTE PedalBox and this was fitted within a few hundred miles of taking delivery of the mk7 GTI.
I've now run the same PedalBox on a 63 plate GTI PP as standard and modified, a 15 plate R both standard and modified, a GTD both standard and (very briefly) modified and now an ED40 CS standard. All of the above cars to me felt really unresponsive at low throttle pedal openings and were improved massively in the enjoyment stakes by the addition of the PedalBox.
When removing the PedalBox from the GTI PP just hours before it went in part-ex I inadvertently found the chip in the top of the pedal assembly so it's easy to see why it works on a different channel to the ECU throttle mapping.
I've long since championed the cause of the PedalBox, so much so that I dread threads with said item in the title as it feels like Groundhog Day me typing the same things over and again. In fact I probably have two topics of forum conversation in my life, PedalBoxes and alloy wheels so I dread conversations about either as probably come across as incredibly dull!
Recently over on VWROC after I'd spent many months avoiding getting into conversations about said boxes and therefore having nothing to talk about on forums
I waded in to a thread where someone was asking whether it was a good idea to fit a box to a Stage 1 car.
"Yes, very much so" was my reply and after a brief disagreement with Rick from Unicorn (who should know quite a bit more about this sort of thing than a thicko like me) he kindly explained in nice simple terms the following:
I don't want to come across argumentative but this isn't the case.
Yes the pedal box is an amplifier, but think about how an amplifier works. If there is a signal, it makes it larger. It cannot amplify zero signal, i.e. all the amplification of dead zone will still result in dead zone. As soon as you touch the throttle it is giving out a voltage, but for this voltage on the golf R it is to give a very very small torque request which is why it feels dead. We alter the torque request at these small throttle angles to get rid of the deadness,
Pedal boxes can amplify the signal by a fixed amount across the RPM range. In the ECU we have a 3D map where we decrease the sensitivity at high RPM as generally the engine become more responsive in this area. There is also another throttle map for when the car is in Sports Mode. From the factory, all Golf R's use the same throttle map for both Sports and Normal. We can change this so that you have a different response in S, just like on an M3/4 etc.
Thanks, Rick
So there you have it.
I'd say that it therefore depends on who remaps your car and what they do in the ECU.
