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The Car Thread


MadManMike

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All sorted after freaking out for a large amount of time. It was to do with the crank signal. It was set up so that it would only find a signal in the rising crank trigger waveform. It needed to be picking it up in the falling mode. I f**king hate anything to do with ecus and cars. 

Firedit up and it was idling perfectly red it

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15 hours ago, Danny said:

I'm guessing updating the firmware basically wiped the ecu?

Edit: Just seen the price of that ECU.  Jesus.  Could buy an mx5 for that.

Yeah pretty much but then I re up loaded my base map and my tuning settings but it didn't restore all the settings properly. 

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Had my first track day as an instructor on Wednesday. I was supposed to just hang around, see what they do and be a sort of free intern. Ended up getting hired, paid and added to the team as a full time instructor. Haven't had so much fun in one day for years. The team which organizes this event is a fantastic bunch of people, all so friendly and approachable. Spent the whole day instructing a gorgeous 24 year old girl who's dad bought her a full day behind the wheel of this Kia so she'd get the idea of a motorcycle out of her head. At the end of the day he decided to buy her a car like that and sponsor her racing "career" and wants me to coach her. 

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And her lap times including 3 of my timed ones and 3 of another instructor. Glad to see a continuous improvement, finally she posted a lap just 4s short of mine although she did that with another instructor and was reluctant to accept it as valid. Not sure what was going on in there :P 

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Did about 15 laps behind the wheel of that thing showing her the correct lines. First time ever driving a FWD car quickly, not my cup of tea but the fact I did about 40 miles around an amazing track AND got paid for doing so is something that will take some getting used to :D The remaining instructors spend much of their time in 911's so there's something to look forward to.

 

We then shot a promotional video of the team involving 2 GT3's, drove the camera man around who was sitting in the open boot of a Cayenne.

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And another fun thing was instructing a fast driver in a lightweight M3. First two laps I was giggling like a girl and it reminded me how I love these cars. The g-forces were absurd (for someone who hasn't driven properly for a few years) and I then found that he was doing low 1:50's, 6s slower than my best time in the previous gen M3. Really put things into perspective for me. It also became clear that at this level of driving I had little idea of how to better his lap times.

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Also had my first chance to sit in an MX5. Although I'm short it was really difficult to fit between the seat and the roof. Had to push the seat right forwards and recline the backrest. The car handled amazingly well from a passenger's perspective. The driver wanted me to help him shave half a second so he could go below 2 minutes but it seems he missed that by .2s. 

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Genuinely feels like the beginning of a proper motorsport career. At the moment I've just got my foot in the door but through meeting new people and getting more skilled at this job I think there's a long and interesting journey ahead - especially as motorsport is exploding in Poland and I'm already in a position to surf the wave. For now I need to get that bloody M3 finished and actually do some driving myself. I can handle instructing a complete novice but when some more experienced drivers asked me for help there wasn't much I could tell them. Most of the advice was about being smooth and braking into corners which seems a bit vague. The man in charge maintains we're not there to coach racing drivers but to offer an exciting day to participants. This means a lot of freedom to work with drivers however I fancy. Got a 10hz GPS somewhere, going to take it with me next time and work some telemetry into my work.

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Ruined a solid(enough) mk1 cab today and yesterday.

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Sump sits about an inch off the floor, the front coilovers are sat on the spring with the shock fully compressed, so he has ordered extended topmounts.
Lowering mine tomorrow some more, rear helpers have to come out or itll hit the driveshafts, and potentially giving it more negative camber if i can be f**ked.
going to buy a load of sheet metal to begin making the rear diffuser too, planned it out with cardboard, and it looks okay, but will need to cut the lower section of my rear bumper to make it look flush.

Ordered a very unique (for the UK) ducktail also, same company as my seatbelt extenders come from, so itll take about 3 months to arrive. 

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Also means when i get the roof spoiler, its going to probably get carbon dipped to match :( 
 

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c/p - sorry if it's a bit of a repeat.

 

Well i've been busy.
 
90% of the time I have also been absolutely scared senseless, i'll explain - So I updated my ecu firmware last week to the latest version which now has an altered dwell time (no idea what that means but apparently it stops the ecu from burning out), I now have a revmeter, I now also have a coolant display, I also now have a fuel pump shut off once primed which is awesome as before it continued to pump on ignition.
 
That's all great, I did however had absolutely no fire up what so ever... I copied over the base map, my map from Chris @ efi and altered some settings thanks to the help from those who had the same ecu as me however it didn't fire at all. The ECU was sensing so RPM. I spoke with a guy at work who has the same ecu as me on his mx5 turbo and told me to play with the crank trigger setting, it can either decent the signal when its rising or falling. Mine was set to the wrong one after the update and luckily changing this to falling fixed it - it then fired up.
 
I was more relieved after this fix compared to the first fire when I fitted the engine, I think it was more because it's only a week before the re-map!
 
I brought a chair downstairs because I knew it was going to be a long night haha
 
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I received a new track day helmet. Absolutely love it.
 
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The next thing on the back of my mind was the brake cooling duct. I originally bought 100mm ducts but didn't want to run 100mm ducting purely because of the size of it. So with a 100-50mm reducer and some 50mm tubing it's all secure. I want to get a laser thermometer to see if it actually makes a difference, and consequently have a play with different sized deflector plates if it doesn't.
 
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The next thing I did was install the emergency hammer and seatbelt cutter. I've opted for this place as it's very easy to reach when strapped in tight in the harnesses. 
 
Started with my favourite invention, the riv nut
 
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I made a better more secure false floor out of 2mm steel plate and some grip tape. It feels much better now compared to the fake carbon fibre abs plastic I had in there before.
 
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I also wired in my N75 valve (boost control) properly, I was told that I could just wire in my carbon canister wiring to the boost solenoid and it would work, nope! Turns out you have to wire in a 12V feed to one side of the N75 valve whilst ONE wire from the carbon canister acts as a switched earth for boost control. It's a massive saving grace that I found this as it wouldn't have been working on my first mapping session...
 
Engine bay pics now it's all finished...
 
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Edgy interior pic to finish
 
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I'm buying some front discs and pads tomorrow (£250!! fml) ready for delivery in the week then fingers crossed i'm all pretty much ready for mapping mk2.
 
Excited? Yeah
Nervous? Unbelievably
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You should try and make some backing plates for the brake cooling ducts, so the air is forced into the discs. As it is at the minute, it's probably not doing a huge amount. I did it on my LCR (following Prawn's advice), and it made a noticeable difference to brake feel

Something like this:

http://new.minimania.com/imagesbig/nmb4000.jpg

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1 hour ago, george_seamons said:

You should try and make some backing plates for the brake cooling ducts, so the air is forced into the discs. As it is at the minute, it's probably not doing a huge amount. I did it on my LCR (following Prawn's advice), and it made a noticeable difference to brake feel

Something like this:

http://new.minimania.com/imagesbig/nmb4000.jpg

That looks like a fantastic idea. Would love to try making something like that. 

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That sort of thing does work well, or maybe some better-shaped deflectors. I ended up with some curved fibreglass ones on my Clio. Dunno if the thread is still on CS... I remember Tony Hunter calling me out for them being too posh, lol.

Don't just send the air to the braking surface btw, it needs to go into the centre of the disc - so the cooling vanes are fed.

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4 hours ago, Adam@TartyBikes said:

That sort of thing does work well, or maybe some better-shaped deflectors. I ended up with some curved fibreglass ones on my Clio. Dunno if the thread is still on CS... I remember Tony Hunter calling me out for them being too posh, lol.

Don't just send the air to the braking surface btw, it needs to go into the centre of the disc - so the cooling vanes are fed.

Thanks adZ. I'll look into that cheers 

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Picked up a Sparco fixed bucket jobber with side mounts for £70.00, bargain. I already had Corbeau rail bases so I've modified those to suit the sidemounts and as a result I have a very sturdy seating solution that sits me in a better position too. 

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My idea of spending an hour after work this evening to finish a repair to my rear engine mount not only resulted in one repaired mount, but this: 

 

Before: 

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After: 

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No diff unfortunately but if I do manage to get my hands on one before Cadwell it's only a few hours work to get it fitted. Insurance starts next week. Can't wait to drive it again. 24mm rear arb on order too which should help things out nicely too. 

 

 

 

 

Edited by SamKidney
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It went well in terms of it didn't blow up or give many issues, the downside is it only made 256bhp but a decent 300ftlb of torque. It feels absolutely epic to drive but obviously there's something niggling away at the back of my mind knowing that I'm 40bhp down, which is a shame as I got a bigger turbo, injectors etc. We believe it's down the exhaust as it's a mismatch of exhaust bits as it goes from a 3" decat out of the exhaust to a 2.25" link pipe then to a 2.5" system however someone's mentioned that silencers are not always the same size inside and I've got three of them(1 in centre and two back boxes). At the moment I'm happy as it's fast but obviously there's more to come. I just want to enjoy it for what it is now for a bit. I've spent all year tinkering I just want to drive it 

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Dropping down to 2.25" won't be helping. Provided it's not reducing that much in order to clear a rear beam/similar then it's a nice easy fix though.
Presumably Boris can't be much over the 1000kg ballpark and 250bhp/tonne is nothing to be sniffed at so it'll be a whole world of fun either way (Y)

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Bear in mind Chris' dyno isn't a boy racer one so doesn't give inflated results. You'd probably make 300bhp on other RRs!

In fact, my old Westfield made exactly the same power as your car at EFI, but 320 on another one in Bolton :lol:

 

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