Type R mapped for UK fuel

Firstly, a MASSIVE thank you to Peter Simmons, for getting the car all sorted and mapped up. It was a fun night. 

So, basically, we gave the car a good few runs in 2nd, 3rd and 4th gear, and Peter was able to keep an eye on the AFR on the gauge, then datalog a lot of the parameters he needed. 

In true to form luck, my AEM Wideband gauge had been giving out strange readings on the last run, before meeting Peter, so luckily he had his decent kit with him and we could use that. It was just a pity as I was really looking forward to logging the AFR into datalogit after all the runs to setup the wiring and software. At least once I replace the gauge, Ill be able to do some logging if I want to change any settings. 

After several laps of the motorway and numerous people in BMW's egging me on to race, which I didn't bother wasting my fuel on (couldn't resist), the timing and fuel maps were getting closer and closer. 

We found that the base map in the ECU was super rich to start with. On full throttle it spluttered, stuttered and almost felt like spark plug hesitation on boost. 

After leaning it out a bit and more AFR logging the fuel was looking good. Peter had a bit of trouble at the start as the timing map was pretty crap. He was able to copy some of the lines from another example map then adjust the values to something more appropriate to get it going. Once the fuel was leaned out a little you could quickly start to feel the car becoming quicker and quicker as timing was adjusted to minimise knock and maintain as much torque as possible. 

Once timing was close to where we wanted and both maps looked good, it was time to have some fun and see what happened when you activated the next boost pressure setting. 

The first couple of settings were only 1.1 and 1.2 BAR, and the waste gate duty cycle needed minor adjusting, but after setting 3 on 1.3 Bar, the car felt "lively" which would be the conservative description.

3rd gear on full boost and slamming her into 4th gear produced 4 wheel drive wheel spin and the back to get loose, which is fun if you want to drift. Not when your flying down the "on" ramp of the motorway. 

Anyway, we did some final pulls to make sure all the readings were repeatable without the check engine light flashing a warning, and that was it! Peter was able, using his virtual dyno and car stats to produce a calculated power graph. Give or take 5-10% its accurate enough so a safe 300BHP is nice and feels very nice for a daily driven car.

Now that the car is going, we can take our time and perfect the small changes we want, to smooth out the maps and make everything on the graph nice and neat so that there is a smooth transition between fuel and timing tables. 

After that, I plan to do some data logging to tweek the waste gate duty cycle a bit and see how that reacts. The Apexi is basic by modern standards, but it keeps it simple, and it works!