Back on the road

After the beasts engine failure the other month, I decided that the GTR really is too good to use as a daily driver, therefore, the Type R is coming out of storage. 

Naturally, I couldn't leave it 'standard', so it's been treated to a Blitz Nut Spec R exhaust system and also the Apexi ECU got fitted too. 

The exhaust fitted perfectly first time, as would be expected for a Japanese product. The baseline is glorious and even at high rpm, there is no drone. 

As a safety measure, I fitted the Power FC with Hand Commander. Although it doesn't have some of the modern advanced features of the up to date Ecus  out there, it's still a great stand alone engine management system. 

Once the stock ecu was removed by pulling back some carpet and trim, I then removed the kick plate and un plugged the ecu. Be sure to disconnect the battery first! Then swap the ecus and plug the loom back in. The car started first time and idled at 1200 rpm but within 3 minutes it had dropped to 900rpm as the ecu 'learned' the fuel and timing. Then 10 minutes on idle, start the A/C for a further 10, then a final 10 with the de mister and lights on. 30 minutes later the car was restarted several times to check everything was good. 

The hand commander lets you access the base map fuel and timing adjustments and after a test drive, I made a spreadsheet to log all the values. This means that after fiddling, you can-back track if need be. 

Even on the stock map, the ecu didn't show a knock value over 8 up to 4000rpm but until l get the wideband gauge on the exhaust I didn't really try it on boost. One nice feature is the global ignition map feature that lets you advance or regard timing across all values on a temporary basis, which then resets once you turn off the ignition. 

The base map runs a massive amount of timing advance, so I pulled 6 degrees of timing for safety and didn't notice any drop in performance. More investigations later...