What software do majority of people use to tune a series II turbo setup? Looks like Mazda edit may be most popular. Thanks.

 

Funny ... There is 1 ....................yes 1 ,turbo S2 known to this site(and that one isn't going yet) . Can't remember what he is using but Mazdaedit will def do the job .

 

It sounds like these may not be the best cars to modify for power.

 

No sir, they are not

 

Simply put, Mazda hit it out of the park with the tuning, Exhaust, Intake, etc will do you little to no good and most will lose power. For FI tuning, the one turbo setup is using a piggyback ECU solution, but everyone is waiting to see if it will work yet. MazdaEdit is just a recent tuning solution for the S2, so there are a few on here who have tuned their NA cars to their liking (no major HP increases really) but nobody has jumped into the deep end of the pool and done a complete write up of how to properly tune an FI solution. I am sure someone will do it with MazdaEdit, but this will be a big cost as there is not a bolt on ready kit so it will need to be built either from an S1 modified kit (which they will have to do) or from scratch. There were a couple of tuners which claimed to be able to put a kit together, but most of them failed miserably either by not being able to hack the ECU or the quality of the kits were less than good. If you are thinking about trying to go FI on an S2, Brettus seems to be the guy to talk about for tuning with MazdaEdit and maybe you can get yourself a kit from Greddy for the S1 to modify for the S2, or even a used Pettit SC kit to adapt.

 

Unless you go to a full ECU replacement, you need a flash based tuning option, and for Series2 MazdaEdit is the only option. Series1 can flash tune with MazdaEdit or Cobb AccessPort, but Cobb never bothered to decode the Series2 ECU, so no support for that.

Edit:
MazdaEdit tunes EXACTLY the same as the AccessPort, both just edit the factory tuning tables. There are several boosted RX-8s using MazdaEdit, and it also is the same as the AccessPort. It's just a different editing interface of the exact same information.

2nd Edit:
There is an Adaptronic piggyback that intercepts fueling completely that may be viable, and allows for MAP based tuning rather than MAF based. It is $1,600 though, closing in on full ECU pricing. I don't know if it will communicate with the S2 ECU or not though.