Engine tuning?
 

Hi, everybody,

I need to get the engine in my TT car tuned. It ran...okay over the weekend. But it's real chunky under partial throttle and refused to rev over 8k. So I short-shifted at roughly 7500 all weekend.

Who do you recommend? This is new territory for me, so I need somebody patient, who will put a safe tune on the car. I'm not looking to burn it up for that last 1%.

Thanks,
Nick

If it refused to rev over 8k then you have issues that need to be sorted before you think about tuning.

You bought the car with a blown engine and swapped it with the good engine from your wrecked car, right?

IIRC, the car was tuned with a Cobb AP before you put your motor in it. Did you keep that? Have you tried reverting to the factory tune? Did the previous owner include a copy of Cobb's software so you can look at the tune's details?

Regarding tuning going forward, are you looking to do a remote tune where you log data and then send it to somebody to write the tune? Or did you want to trailer it to a place with a dyno? I know Parkland College has a dyno at their very nice facility and you could talk to Jon Ross about getting access to it.

If you want to get into tuning it yourself, forum member Kane did some training videos on the subject.
https://www.rx8club.com/series-i-eng...urther-253444/

It was hitting a hard cut at 8k. This is an engine that ran very well before I, admittedly, rolled the car it was in. Twice.

The engine is a Mazda reman that tested well before that fateful weekend. Compression all in the green. It has only been used for three weekends on track. That's it. So figure only a few hundred miles.

The biggest differences: now the engine is using the BHR ignition, and an aftermarket tune on the ECU that goes with the car. I tried to just plug in the ECU from my old car, but the PN was different and the car wouldn't start.

Correct. The only differences are the ECU that camee with the car (it won't run with the ECU from my old one) and the BHR ignition.

It has been tuned, yes. I don't really want to say by whom publicly, because the problems I'm having are unlikely to be their fault.

I have software, but I have no idea what to do with it. I also can't even get the AP to connect to a PC. It connects to the car, and has some maps loaded, but I have no reason to trust them. I do not believe I have software to make actual edits to maps.

I'm open to suggestions. If I can get the AP to connect to a PC, then tuning via email is an option.[/QUOTE]

Thanks. I'm not sure that's a route I really want to go, but I'll take a look.

Did you reset the eccentric shaft sensor profile after the engine change? (the ole 20-time brake pedal press trick). Swap the BHR ignition out for regular coils and see if that fixes it. The solution here is in troubleshooting, not tuning.

If you can't get the AP to talk to a computer then that makes things more difficult. IMO, step 1 would be figuring out how to get the tune reverted to the factory setup to get it to baseline.

You can start troubleshooting from there if the issues don't go away.

you can use a laptop and OBD2 cable and software like OBDWiz to do some datalogging for cheap (under $50). can look at AFR, see if you're getting any stored codes or freeze frame data. Grewvin tuning can flash your OEM ECU; you can find him on facebook.