Duncan's V37.......race car?

[The Bogan]

1 hour ago, Duncan said:

So, the other thing I've sorted is a baseline dyno run up at Unigroup's new location.

The auto trans was a little unco-operative by both shifting down when the throttle was floored on the dyno (so Mark had to ramp it up more slowly than in a manual) and also by shifting up at 6,000 even in sports mode instead of the indicated redline of 7,000

Still, on a hot day it made 240rwkw at 16psi which seems about right for 300kw (400hp) through an auto at the wheels. 

The shape of the curve is not quite right because it was not full throttle to about 4,500 to stop it kicking down, but until I can get a tune on the auto trans control this was the best we could do.....full boost will be well below 5,000 once that is sorted, I'll get some data logs when I can to confirm

For comparison, the R32 made 255 at 12psi (at 4,500) on the same dyno with tune, n1 turbos, cam gears, big exhaust but otherwise all standard so the v37 is likely a little better out of the box.

One thing that is very clear is that the standard water to air intercoolers are not up to sustained use at full throttle in warm ambient temps. After about 5 runs (so only a few minutes full throttle), it was pulling boost and timing and dropping 10-15% power. Unfortunately I didn't get that printout and the Unigroup guys are away at the moment, will try and get hold of it on their return.

So, looks like a healthy engine to start modifying and the only real area of concern is the w2a heat exchangers which the aftermarket has plenty of solutions for

 

 

Can you log IAT?

Whilst WTA coolers have their place, doing any sort of sustained run is not one of them

There are fixes that slow down the heat soak, like ice boxes, which don't last that long, and interchillers, which are fairly expensive, up grades to the WTA cooling radiator, which may require a bigger pump, and upgrades to the reservoir size,  and upgrades to the cooling fans, but, it all still heat soaks, and takes ages to come down in hot weather 

For a turbo, that isn't locked into WTA like my PD blower is, can you not possibly swap to a nice air to air intercooler????, it would be better for sustained runs then, and have alot less things that could go wrong in my opinion 

[Duncan]

Can I log IAT eh? Well, can now

So next thing was looking at data logging. Not straight forward because none of the motorsport displays have cracked the nissan/inifinti CAN and ECU based displays don't do g logging, lap timing, predictive laps etc. 

So, I bought an Ecutek dongle from Tunehouse (Oz distributor). Even without a tune onboard that allows display and logging of about 50 parameters via Android (and presumably iOS) app. Approx 600 for the bluetooth + Usb version

That gives me (pretty ugly but) functional dash display on Android

And logging of these parameters

I'll play around a bit over the break, but at least now I can make sure I have oil pressure when I get to some track testing.

 

[Duncan]

From there it is trickier. Ecutek seems to be one of those closed ecosystems where everyone password protects their tunes which means I either choose a tuner and can't change from them and can't make any changes myself for any reason, or I have to buy the tuning software (about $4k) and then get someone to tune from scratch (which is not simple with all the multi dimensional tables these days).

Once you buy about 300 "flash points" per ECU you can get it tuned and add their "RaceROM" function which hacks extra functionality like launch control onto the ECU, and also makes extra data available for logging over CAN

Not sure what I'll do there yet; I'm tempted to use one of the overseas shops that does billions of remote tunes of the platform instead of starting from scratch locally, a lot can be done online these days.

[MBS206]

I'd need to check my notes at work Duncan, but I'm pretty sure most of that is purely OBD2 on the display.

How quickly is it all able to update?

Do you have any internet capability in your workshop with a laptop?

[Duncan]

Right, its been a while for updating this car, but I made some small but important progress today.

In the end I bought an Ecutek dongle from the Australian distributor Tunehouse (for local hardware support) but have gone with a remote tune from Racebox in the US (because they have done millions of these, and I could not find any tuner where I could access the tune anyway as they are all password locked).

The App is reasonably easy to work with, but the PC software reminds me of Haltech's ECU Manager that you need to use with the Plat Pro ECUs, it is a nightmare.  Anyway, I sent the details over, got back a tune file and a request for data logs.

I finally got a chance to access a private test track today as they want redline logs in 3rd and 4th, and have sent them back for the first round of reviews. The main difference in the tune is going from 1.0 (stock) to 1.3 bar (19psi), although I'm sure is a lot of other stuff in the background.

Keeping in mind this is a dead stock car with 125,000klm, this is what the App's performance test claimed:

Before

After

Interesting to note that both 400m tests had the same terminal speed (158klm/h) but different ETs. And no, the speed limiter seems to be higher than that at 186kl/h.

Summary of the key logged parameters for the 3rd and 4th gear runs were:

Those little turbos were certainly whizzing at 200,000rpm+.  Also I'm really not that excited about oil pressure 55psi at redline so I think I'll go thicker than 5w30 (nissan recommend 0w20....) and see if that improves it. Other than that (and the big boost spike....) everything looks good as a start to me.