ECU Upgrade

   I have quite a story to tell you about the SuperChip.  Well, Thursday rolled around and the ECU came back, fitted with the new chip and a new socket. We also got the old chip back. Once it was in we started the car and immediately got a little worried because it idled at 2500-3000rpm. After waiting until the cooling fan went on (3/4 mark on the temp gauge for those who haven't read the manual) we figured something was wrong, but took it out (carefully) to see if we could tell what it was. That was a mistake.  The motor ran like crap.  We tried one boost run, which resulted in ..7-.9 bar, knocking, extreme leanness, and very probably a blown engine if the guy driving hadn't been working on turbo conversions for the last 10 years. Good luck for me that I am having my shop do this and not trying it myself.  We refitted the old chip and established that things were OK and tried to figure out what to do next. First order of business was to call SuperChips and bitch a little.  After all, a less experienced installer would probably have destroyed the engine.  It turns out that they had trouble reading my chip, and instead of calling and telling us it would take a day longer (when their chip guy could actually come in and see what he could do) they took a guess and sent us a chip.  Nice. Especially considering that my shop is a SuperChips distributor and have sold perhaps a hundred SuperChip upgrades.

   So now what to do about the Elan?  Well, again luckily, my shop has been installing custom turbochargers and selling turbo conversion kits for many years and as such were in a great position to come up with something as good as or, hopefully, better than the chip upgrade. OK, clearly even when running the bad chip, the car was VERY happy with the extra boost pressure.  But now how do we get that boost?  The problem is fuel.  The only way to make more horsepower is to burn more gas.  But you can only burn a given amount of gas with the limited oxygen available in the cylinder. All the rest merely exhausts and makes the EPA pissed. So you use an air compressor to fill the cylinder with more air, and thus you can burn more gas. When we say that we want "more boost" in the Elan, we REALLY mean that we want to burn more gas, which means we require more air. So we turn up the pressure allowance of the compressor system (turbo), and feed in more fuel.  Sure, you can fiddle with the waste gate actuator to get more boost pressure, but all you'll do is destroy the engine. You see, burning too much gas for a given amount of fuel will simply burn too cool, foul your sparkplugs and make a nasty smell, whereas too little will burn too hot, melt your pistons, etc., with the obvious consequences.  My BMW, for instance, actually has an instrument that measures the air/fuel ratio in realtime so that I will know if I'm running lean under boost. This is, as they say, and important safety tip. A rising rate fuel regulator is a device that increases fuel pressure based on intake manifold pressure.  What the chip does to dump more fuel in is to increase the time that the injectors stay on. Barring that, you can simply increase the pressure for the same duration. Either way, you get the right amount of fuel for the available oxygen (the stochiometrically ideal ratio).  The exact same valve that comes with the chip upgrade will fool the turbo into providing more pressure.  The stock chip already knows how to adjust the timing up to the stock boost limit; there is no reason that that program should not do just as good a job above that.  (It should be noted here that this is a reliable, time tested way to increase boost.  In fact, having programmed, in part, my own ECU for my BMW, I can say that I would trust this system a bit more since I'm in control, not some guy who wrote a stock program 3 years ago for someone else's test car.)

     Anyway, IT WORKS LIKE MAGIC. So well, in fact, that it makes you wonder why they ever limited to factory boost. The Isuzu motor is really sweet. Performance is as stock except on boost, when suddenly the motor does what you expected it to do all along.  There are a few problems.  First and foremost, the turbo is too small to maintain anything over .65 bar or so. When you get on it, it spikes to about a bar, then drops to .5, then maintains about .65 or .7 bar. An electronic boost controller would help here, since it would do a much less wasteful job of limiting the boost. We have the current mechanical one set at about 1 bar, but will be trying en EBC very soon. But basically a turbo upgrade would be terrific. The car is totally happy at 1 bar, the motor is easily strong enough, the ECU is well set up for it already.  This will be true no matter how you are feeding fuel, i.e. the boost control is the same here as for the SuperChips mod, so we are working on this next.  When I bought the Elan, the guys at my garage scoffed at it. They are used to making 650+hp 240 Z's, Turbo kits for BMWs, racecars, and the like and really didn't expect much from the Elan except that it looked cute.  But suddenly, after all the playing around, they're stoked.  Clearly, this car will go like a bastard. Clearly, this car handles like very little else.  When I walked in there to pick up my car, they were fitting a strut brace blueprint to it, and talking about K&N filter kits and offering the Boost kit via mail. Since it is clearly as good or better than the chip, more adjustable, and likely to cost less, I encouraged them to add an Elan section to their catalog asap. I'll keep you posted.