So, now that I've finally got a minute after a mad day at work, I can take the time to write about our day
It was long!
I set off just after 6am, and went to pick Jardo up.
Last time I took Jardo somewhere, he turned up looking like a Polish car wash attendant rocking this dodgy double denim number:
This time, I planned ahead, and specically asked him not to look like a twit for the trip, so he put on his best Christmas jumper and chinos instead....
I can cope, it was a nice morning, even if we do get some funny looks cruising along with the Big Gay Wing:
We arrived at Rtech just before 9 and were greeted by Marcus moving cars about, Ben arrived a few minutes later, and we got the car onto the ramp:
Mr G arrived and we removed the front bumper, ready to roll onto the dyno. I also removed the scuttle panel and wipers to allow Niki to connect the ECU emulator:
The straps were tightened, and the fans wheeled into place:
The very first run, on actuator pressure, as arrived:
298bhp / 280lbft, a good start.
A few more runs, and it seemed to settle around 295-296 on actuator. Niki then ran it on N75 power, to see what it was doing on boost:
342bhp and 334lbft on the old map.
Next, Niki set about tweaking the fuelling. It was clear on the actuator pressure run that the richness top end was robbing it of lots of power.
A few tweaks later saw 321bhp on actuator pressure, with the sme 280lbft as before:
Going well so far then!
Fast forward a few more runs, and Niki started to add some boost:
370bhp / 350lbft ish
It made some flames:
And JoJo turned up in the worlds tidiest early S3:
Jo is a hero, Jo bought us lunch, it was a pretty epic feast! Thanks so much for that!
Vex182 also popped over in his lunch break, great to meet you Dan
Sorry we didn't get any pics of your presence
Playing around with boost levels, this one shows the spool nicely, that's 1.5 bar reached at 3300rpm. On the road it reaches this even sooner, by 3000rpm
A few other runs, trying different things each run:
Then it made more flames:
Niki did one run asking it for LOTS of boost, resulting in 1.8 bar peak and 1.7 bar still at 7000rpm, and it did it too, result was 381bhp and 371lbft, but for the gain of 10bhp / 15lbft, we were having to push another 0.3 bar, so it just wasn't worth it.
Final result after all the fiddling:
378bhp 352lbft. It's worth noting that that run was done in inertia mode after all of the mapping and tweaking being done against the brake. Niki said he always does a run in interia at the end of a session as that's how it's done on most rolling road days.
Typical power repeatably run after run seemed to be anywhere from 368-374bhp, as you can see from the graph this is dyno run 70 from the day! so it had a fair old bit of testing!
On the road, this, is REEEEEEAAAAALLLLYYYY GOOD!!!!
The map is fairly aggressive, with strong boost the whole way through the range, but Nikis still held it well back from it's earlier 370lbft state where it would have been a true animal I'm sure.
He's also done something very interesting with the throttle mapping, which I'm really liking so far, the first 50-60% of the throttle do not request any N75 duty at all, so up to 50% throttle the car runs at 1 bar and just pulls really nicely and smoothly.
it's only when you go beyond 60% throttle right up to 100% that it starts making any additional boost request and the full force is unleashed, it seems to work really well existing bends, where you want to be feeding the power in gently so as not to upset the balance, then when you know it'll take it you can press that last 20% and it really, REALLY takes off.
3rd gear is now absolutely savage, and even 4th and 5th still pull hard from anything above 3k rpm. the Rev limit is now at 7600rpm too, although it still finds it too fast in 2nd and 3rd!
