- Hey team, Andre from High Performance Academy here and welcome to another one of our webinars.
Now today we're going to be going through some of the intricacies of setting up idle
speed control, specifically we are going to be using the MegaSquirt MS3 Pro ECU on
this Mazda MX5 or Mazda Miata if you're from the US market.
And this in my opinion is one of those subtle aspects that so many tuners just don't bother
getting right and particularly for a daily driven car it really can make a massive difference.
It's always nice if you've got a car that you can basically reach in the window regardless
whether it's the middle of winter or the middle of summer, turn the key and it will start and
idle without you needing to nurse it with your foot on the throttle.
Before we get into that though, just covering off a few things that have been happening
here over the last week or so.
One of the ones that we're really excited to mention is we are running another one
of our giveaways and I'm pretty confident this one is going to be really popular.
We've partnered with Haltech and we're giving away one of their brand new Haltech
Nexus R5 ECUs plus our suite of training courses.
Now if you've been living under a rock, the Nexus was announced probably around
about 18 months ago now at PRI back in 2019, back when the world was allowed to travel.
And that was pre release, it wasn't actually available for public consumption until around
about this time, maybe a little bit later last year.
One of the novel aspects with the Nexus R5 which when you look at it now, really just makes
perfect sense, is that the have incorporated a ECU and this is an iteration beyond their
existing Elite Series ECUs, they've added a lot more technology into the ECU, a lot
more functionality into the ECU.
They've also incorporated a full power distribution module, power management unit
depending on how you want to refer to that so this is basically a complete vehicle
electronics control package.
You can control all of your power distribution to your various circuits throughout the car as
well as your engine management, do it all from the one place.
So it really neatens up your installation and your solution for the electronics side of things.
Now on top of that we are also giving away our suite of tuning courses so that
you're going to know exactly what to do with that Haltech Nexus R5 if you do happen to
be the lucky winner.
Total prize package there is somewhere in the vicinity of about $5000 USD so this is probably
one of our biggest prizes that we have given away.
So on my laptop screen at the moment, this is the little page you'll come through to if you click
the link that the team will drop into the comments.
We've got 22 days left to get your name into that draw.
Regardless where you are in the world, we'll ship it to your door free of charge,
doesn't matter where you're personally located, don't worry, you won't miss out.
When you do get your name into the draw, there are also a few other tasks that you
can complete that will give you a few extra entries, giving you a little bit more
chance of winning that epic prize.
So 22 days left, make sure that you get your name into the draw.
Now for those of you who have been watching over the last few of our webinars,
I have kind of previewed an upcoming course that I was working on for the last
few months and this is one that I know is going to be helpful to a lot of tuners
out there.
This is the topic of continuous variable cam control tuning.
Now it's something that at the start of my career we were seeing a lot of ECUs
that didn't actually have the ability to control continuously variable cam control.
Just to take one step back for those who aren't aware of what I'm talking about,
with that technology it allows us the ability to advance or retard the camshaft
while the engine's actually operating so we can map the camshaft opening
and optimise it relative to engine load and engine RPM.
And as I mentioned, at the time a lot of ECUs didn't have this technology available
to control the variable cam position and we saw a few of the performance engines
start to come out that incorporated variable valve timing technology.
At the time I remember distinctly a number of the name brand ECUs basically played down
the technology that it really wasn't that valuable and really it was mainly around
emissions so if we just jump over to my laptop screen, this is just a screenshot
that I actually took as part of this course and this is from our turbocharged Toyota 86.
So we've got a red and a blue run here, this is actually power and torque and what we can
see is first of all if we go over to the right hand side, the actual peak power and torque
values here are relatively similar.
This is where I've only been varying the intake cam and you can see up the top here,
we've actually mentioned what we've got here so the blue run is with the intake cam at the
zero advance position so this is its natural position which generally will favour high RPM
performance.
The red run there is with the cam timing tuned and just this particular point that I have listed
here, we can see we've gone from 142 horsepower, 143 horsepower up to 205 horsepower, almost
206 horsepower just by optimising the cam timing on the intake cam.
So around about 60 horsepower gain, a lot of this has come by improving the turbo boost
response.
So personally that for me, it's not joke, this is a real technology that is incredibly
valuable, it makes a massive difference and if you are running a variable valve timing
engine and you had an ECU that wasn't capable of controlling it, understandably
you're leaving a lot of potential power and torque on the table.
So what we've done is we've created this course because the next obvious question is, how do we
actually go about optimising the cam timing?
And if you aren't really aware of the process behind this then it can be pretty daunting,
it can be confusing and it's also very easy to end up getting results that actually don't
do justice to the possible performance that you can get out of it.
So given that we know that this is something that a lot of people struggle with, we have
created our Variable Cam Timing course so I'm just going to take you through this
and we'll head over to my laptop screen.
I'll just show you where you can find it, it literally was launched about an hour ago.
So you go to hpacademy.com and click on our courses and if you scroll right down to the
bottom under advanced tuning topics, we have our Variable Cam Tuning course.
It is currently available for $149 USD.
If we click find out more, I'll just take you through what is included and you can do
this obviously at your leisure.
You can watch a video that explains it in a bit more detail than I'm going to do here.
And if we come down and click on view curriculum this will take you through the
modules, I'll just expand these all out.
So we start with the fundamentals of cam control and while this is focused primarily
on continuously variable cam control, I also do cover in this course some of the
other techniques such as switched cam control, we liken this to the system that
Honda use with their VTEC, Nissan with VVL and also some of the switched cam advanced
control functions from the likes of Nissan with their variable cam timing which
is not where it's continuously variable, the intake cam is just swung between two
maximum and minimum limits.
Toyota also incorporated this on the black top Toyota 4AGE.
So you'll find out what the difference between fixed versus variable cam timing is,
we talk about what actually, what is inside one of the continuously variable cam
control actuators.
Then for those who are running a fixed cam engine we talk about vernier cam gears,
how those work, talk about switched versus continuous variable cam control
Inlet versus exhaust cam, so you will notice that particularly at the start of the development
of this technology continuously variable cam control was normally only applied to the
intake valve or intake cam.
And the reason for this is that the engine performance is such more sensitive to
intake cam timing changes.
There are some advantages with having it on both cams which is why we see now
it's quite popular on both cams on your engine.
Then we'll talk about our system requirements, the hardware, the inputs and outputs that
are required, the ECU control systems and some of the considerations around the oil
that you're running as well as aftermarket cams.
We dive into some of the different ECU control strategies that are available here, everyone's
got their own idea, particularly in the OE tuning world so I should point out, this course
not solely for those who are interested in learning about tuning an aftermarket
standalone, we also cover the mainstream factory systems as well and how those work.
The other aspect is that PID control.
This is the backbone of continuously variable cam control tuning.
And if we don't get this right, this is the closed loop system that will define how
the system will respond if we're targeting a certain cam angle and we're not quite there.
So if we don't have this right, the whole tuning is going to be flawed so we talk in depth about
what PID is, we'll give you a practical analogy and then we actually give you a real demonstration
on the dyno showing the process of dialling in the PID gains to get really crisp stable
control.
This is something that I know a lot of tuners get put off by but it's actually really
really easy and quick to do with cam control because the system is so easy to manipulate
and get consistent and repeatable results.
We then look at some of the practical skills here such as ECU configuration, PID optimisation,
optimising our inlet cam timing.
Optimising dual variable cam control, part throttle cam timing as well as a really
important one here, particularly as the world moves on, the effect of cam timing
on our emissions.
Now I know in the aftermarket tuning world, we're generally looking for power over
emissions but as emission standards become more and more stringent, this is something
you are going to have to think about, we show a live demonstration on the dyno, how the
cam timing affects, specifically in that example our oxides of nitrogen or NOx emissions.
We also include a simple HPA 5 step tuning process here which covers the
process you can apply irrespective of essentially what style of cam control
you are using so be it you're tuning a VTEC style system with a simple switch
cam control or you're tuning dual variable cam control, it doesn't matter there.
Now we do have a couple of worked examples that are in this.
They're not in there at the moment but they will be within the next 24 hours.
Covering the tuning process on a continuously variable cam control engine, specifically our
Subaru STi fitted with the Haltech Elite ECU.
So if you're interested in that course, go and check it out, again you'll find it
at hpacademy.com/courses.
Now just a quick update as well on our SR86, I did mention a couple of weeks
ago we were back up and running.
And one of the reasons we wanted that up and running is that we actually used
the SR86 for a couple of the topics in the cam control course.
Our SR86 is fitted with an SR20 with a VVL cylinder head from Nissan.
So that incorporates the switched cam mechanism much like Honda's
VTEC so I use that to demonstrate how to optimise switch cam timing.
But we've also fitted vernier adjustable cam gears to that so we actually go
through a full worked example on how to optimise the location or the timing on vernier
adjustable cam gears which is common on older fixed cam engines.
Now one of the problems we'd had with the SR20, and it's a strange problem but
a problem nonetheless is that it wanted to rev too high.
And we were originally using a set of Kelford cams.
And we weren't trying to make power at 9000 RPM but that's basically exactly
what they did.
And this is not really something we wanted for an engine that's going to be used for
endurance racing.
And we wanted to basically pull back the RPM range that we were using and ideally
we wanted to bolster the mid range performance from the GTX3076 Gen 2
turbo.
So head over to the laptop screen again, we fitted, instead of the Kelford cams, a set of
factory Nissan P12 Primera cams.
And we've got the overlay here and it hasn't quite given me the exact results I wanted
but it's a good comparison anyway so in the red run here, what we have is the old Kelford
cams, the last time we had the engine running.
And I've just used this, this wasn't the maximum amount of power we ended up
with but I've used it as a good comparison at the same boost pressure.
So both of these runs were made at 15 psi, let's call it 1 bar if you like to work in metric.
So it's a nice comparison there.
Unfortunately while I do have boost down the bottom, we don't actually have that logged for
our red run which is a little bit of a shame.
However what we can see, at the particular point that I've highlighted here, 4800 RPM
we've gone from 222 wheel horsepower to 274 wheel horsepower.
So a pretty handy 50 horsepower gain through the mid range here.
Despite that you can actually see that right up at 7600 RPM here we actually
haven't really given away a lot.
Peak power with our P12 cams at 7600 RPM ended up being 457 horsepower, I think we
ended up with 460 but we're splitting hairs there, versus 506 with the Kelford cams.
Now a lot of this is you can see, the Kelford cams, we were revving out to in this case,
8700 RPM.
Interestingly even with the P12 cams, at 7600 RPM, the power and more importantly the torque
are actually still climbing.
So if I'd actually continued that out to 8500, 8700 I think we'd have probably seen a similar
trend, although I'd sort of be expecting that this would end up tapering off a little bit
like this so the powerband's still really a little bit higher than I'd wanted by
definitely an improvement.
While it's not the perfect solution at the moment, what we are going to do is simply
cap the maximum RPM at 7600 RPM at least for endurance racing.
Once we've proven the whole package we may bump the RPM limit for some sprint
races up to maybe 8000 or maybe even 8500 RPM.
But ultimately this is only at 15 psi, if we want more power, it's going to be as simple
as adding more boost but for the time being, I think 460 wheel horsepower is
going to be more than adequate for the car.
If everything goes well, and we are chasing a few gremlins with the ABS system at the
moment, if all goes well, we may actually be having the opportunity to shake the
car down this week and even compete in a sprint race this weekend so we'll see how
that all goes.
Alright just heading back to my notes for a second and I have been mentioning this
for the last few webinars but we're pretty excited about it so I'm going to keep
mentioning it.
We've got a podcast, so if you have not been following and this is news to you,
if we head over to my laptop screen, if you go to hpatechtorque.com you'll
come through to this page and that'll give you access to basically all of our
webinars and you've got the ability to basically download those on any of
your usual places where you would listen to podcasts so we'd love it if you go along
and subscribe.
Also leave us a review if you like what you're hearing, that's going to be great
to improve our visibility and will allow us then to improve and bring out more podcasts
as well.
Right I just want to mention our latest YouTube video and this is actually from
about 12 months ago now, this was filmed at the Sydney Jamboree which unfortunately
ended up getting rained out.
This was the last time we were allowed to leave the country.
Just before New Zealand and Australia went into our respective COVID lockdowns.
This is an XW Ford Falcon and it's not like most XW Falcons because it's running a
4000 horsepower Proline twin turbo V8.
It's making the 4000 horsepower at about 45 psi and one of the interesting things with
this car is it's not just a case of making power, it's easy to make power with a large cube
V8 with modern turbo technology on methanol fuel, but getting that to the ground through a
275 drag radial is the challenging part.
So we dive into what's involved in getting the power to the ground, tuning that and most
importantly an area that is so often overlooked, when we look at all these
videos online about these huge power drag engines, we dive into what's actually involved
with maintaining one of these engines and keeping it alive.
Because of course it's not just a case of going and running laps at the drag strip,
if you want to keep an engine like this in one piece, it does require a lot of attention
so if you're interested, go check that out on our YouTube channel, while you're there
subscribe if you enjoyed that video give us a thumbs up and also if you've got any
questions on it, please feel free to ask in the comments, we try our very best to answer
as many questions as we can.
Now on the same note as well, just going through our social media, I just wanted to jump
across to our Instagram and this is an Instagram we put up recently which is an
engine that I was involved in the tuning of quite a while ago.
Which is a New Zealand designed and built Synergy V8.
This uses a pair of motorcycle cylinder heads on a CNC machined block.
Nothing particularly unusual, we've seen this with the Hayabusa based V8s in the likes of
the Radical V8s as well for a fair while the RPE V8 which we've got a YouTube video on as well,
but the interesting thing here is not so much the engine as the inlet trumpets and this,
on face value might look a little bit odd, what we've got here is different length intake
trumpets.
And this is actually pretty commonplace in the sport motorbike world and the idea here
obviously is that with different length inlet trumpets, we're going to be optimising
the cylinder for volumetric efficiency at different RPM ranges.
Now that might seem like a weird idea but with some of these engines the power
delivery and the torque can be very very peaky and so by going with a split length
inlet trumpet like this, basically it smooths out that torque curve and particularly on
a sport bike this can make the world of difference in terms of drivability.
Rideability, maybe you'd call it that, I'm not too sure.
So obviously one of the implications with this is because we're going to have different
volumetric efficiency cylinder to cylinder based on the inlet trumpet length,
this does affect our tuning strategy as well.
In the perfect world there we'd really want the likes of individual cylinder lambda so
we can see exactly what's going on.
But an interesting technique nonetheless, obviously we've seen vehicles over the years
in the motorsport world which have used continuously variable length inlet trumpets.
So there they can optimise the length of the trumpets basically to improve the torque
curve and the usable rev range.
Alrighty we're going a bit long here so I will finish up but I will finish up just by
reminding you that giveaway for the Haltech Nexus R5 22 days left, again there's a link
in the comments that you can follow to get your name into the draw,
don't miss out, it is a great giveaway, $5000 USD worth of value right there
so don't miss out on that.
Give me a few moments here and we'll get started with today's webinar.
If you liked that video make sure you give it a thumbs up
and if you're not already a subscriber, make sure you're subscribed.
We release a new video every week.
And if you like free stuff, we've got a great deal for you.
Click the link in the description to claim your free spot to our next live lesson.