SpecE30 and Megasquirt

#21

You’ll change your mind after you spend months tearing your hair out because you can’t find a problem that only seems to occur at $600 track weekends. Having data that would let me be 100% positive that I could rule out all DME inputs as the culprit would be huge. God what a pita intermittant engine performance problems are.

Lets look at what gets replaced when an engine is having intermittant performance problems.
Plug wires $130
Plugs $25
Rotor $60
Dist cap $70
Coil $40
O2 sensor $90
CPS $80
TPS $70
Temp sender $40
Used DME $40
Used AFM $40
Clean/flow injectors $130
Used Engine harness $40

Maybe new engine harness $600
Maybe new AFM $350
Maybe new injectors $380

That doesn’t count the wasted time, wasted events and aggravation.

This idea could make all that badness go away.[/quote]

All that stuff is brand new on my car. I have no issues and don’t want to go mess with it. So on the one hand, most of us were so reluctant to drop a measly 50lbs from the car but going to MS is ok? I don’t get it. This opens up another can of worms re how to equalize cars with/without as well. If we want to go the SRF route, then all ECUs need to come from one source and be PnP (Plug and Play), given the cost, i am sure this will be even more controversial than the Spec exhaust rule.

#22

On the Ranger scale of bad ideas where 1 = “Hey let’s add another indicator light” to 10 = “Oops, that’s was my neighbor. I should have looked before I fired.”, it’s about 4.

#23

You’re assuming everyones car is sick and troublesome, and that is not the case!!

#24

So we’re going to take off a system that has factory engineering, manuals, dealer support and every person who’s ever worked in a German car shop has seen before and replace it with a home-brew system nobody but the tuner crowd knows how to work on?
:huh:
No thanks. You guys can start the SEM30 series if you want. I didn’t choose this series to become a tuner. If you dislike the platform enough to want to rip out the factory injection and replace it with a DIY setup perhaps another class would better suit your tuning desires. Just sayin.

#25

SMTurbo link

#26

Let me first start out and say that this would have been a great idea, when the first set of rules came out. But now, this kind of rule change is very drastic. This would require everyone to spend more money, time, and lots of more potential problems.

If you do not know how to properly diagnose and fix a problem, pay someone who is qualified.

When i have a problem i call Frank Rizzo, he worked on race cars for a number of years :stuck_out_tongue:

#27

AFM does not have to be removed. I have been running MS for about 5 years…you simply wire around the AFM and add the MAP and Temp sensors…plug and play. I really like the idea for the spec class…it makes teching the tune very easy, and will allow a reasonable tune to increase motor longevity. You could even require everyone to show up at the driver’s meeting with their ECU and every one exchange. Good idea. CB

#28

[quote=“PThibault” post=57839]Let me first start out and say that this would have been a great idea, when the first set of rules came out. But now, this kind of rule change is very drastic. This would require everyone to spend more money, time, and lots of more potential problems.

If you do not know how to properly diagnose and fix a problem, pay someone who is qualified.

When i have a problem i call Frank Rizzo, he worked on race cars for a number of years :P[/quote]
Some problems are tricky. Frank will tell you that. Have fun troubleshooting the problem between events in a non-street legal car when the problem only occurs at WOT >5k rpm in 3rd gear or higher.

#29

The only thing I’m assuming is that eventually everyone will struggle with strange engine symptoms. All of our stuff is old so some struggle is inevitable. Everyone doesn’t have sick cars, but I can guarentee you that in every region there is someone struggling with this sort of thing. Right now it’s his turn. Maybe you are next.

#30

[quote=“ddavidv” post=57837]So we’re going to take off a system that has factory engineering, manuals, dealer support and every person who’s ever worked in a German car shop has seen before and replace it with a home-brew system nobody but the tuner crowd knows how to work on?
:huh:
No thanks. You guys can start the SEM30 series if you want. I didn’t choose this series to become a tuner. If you dislike the platform enough to want to rip out the factory injection and replace it with a DIY setup perhaps another class would better suit your tuning desires. Just sayin.[/quote]
Am not suggesting you become a tuner. Am asking for comments on an idea that would greatly simplify engine management diagnosis. There doesn’t have to be anything DIY about this and ideally, nothing to “work on”. You connect the box to the sensors and you’re done.

Your dreaming if you think there’s a whole bunch of folks out there that really understand how our Bosch system works.

What I dislike is having a problem and not being able to gather data that might point me towards the cause, or to be able to exclude possible causes. I dislike being constrained to track time to test possible solutions. I dislike the clumsy and expensive “start replacing parts” approach to solving problems. And I dislike it when the ultimate engine managment solution defies all common sense.

#31

You’ll change your mind after you spend months tearing your hair out because you can’t find a problem that only seems to occur at $600 track weekends. Having data that would let me be 100% positive that I could rule out all DME inputs as the culprit would be huge. God what a pita intermittant engine performance problems are.

Lets look at what gets replaced when an engine is having intermittant performance problems.
Plug wires $130
Plugs $25
Rotor $60
Dist cap $70
Coil $40
O2 sensor $90
CPS $80
TPS $70
Temp sender $40
Used DME $40
Used AFM $40
Clean/flow injectors $130
Used Engine harness $40

Maybe new engine harness $600
Maybe new AFM $350
Maybe new injectors $380

That doesn’t count the wasted time, wasted events and aggravation.

This idea could make all that badness go away.[/quote]

All that stuff is brand new on my car. I have no issues and don’t want to go mess with it. So on the one hand, most of us were so reluctant to drop a measly 50lbs from the car but going to MS is ok? I don’t get it. This opens up another can of worms re how to equalize cars with/without as well. If we want to go the SRF route, then all ECUs need to come from one source and be PnP (Plug and Play), given the cost, i am sure this will be even more controversial than the Spec exhaust rule.[/quote]
Most folks don’t buy a new harness, new DME and new alternator. More power to you for doing so. Of course that adds up to ~4X the cost of this idea.

#32

DME/Harness isn’t new but alternator is. it’s not the up-front cost i object to. it’s the increase in complexity, you are introducing another not as well understood element to the equation and I don’t really buy that it will solve all the problems anyways. I for one don’t really want to tinker with my car all weekend, just check tire pressures, temps and oil level and go.

#33

[quote=“Ranger” post=57846]

Your dreaming if you think there’s a whole bunch of folks out there that really understand how our Bosch system works. [/quote]

I disagree. Perhaps there are not a lot of SpecE30 racers who understand the injection system, but I can assure you there are plenty of commercial technicians that have worked on the hundreds of thousands of Motronic systems on German and Swedish cars that understand it well. There are times that perhaps one must admit something is outside their area of comfort or expertise. I certainly don’t plan on rebuilding any transmissions; I know enough to stroke a check to Drive Gear for one of theirs when it’s needed. We’re not all going to be experts on every single aspect of these cars, nor do I personally want to be. However, I’m not afraid of teaching myself new things either. This is in my library:

Q: How many of us have had a FI problem? Follow up: How many have had a problem they couldn’t figure out with the help of this board or another forum?

Q: How many of us don’t have a shelf in the garage with spare parts to help diagnose pesky problems like these? These cars are old; we should all have a box of spare stuff.

#34

No one is suggesting that this is about tinkering nor solving all our problems. It’s about having diagnostic logs should you need them.

#35

[quote=“ddavidv” post=57849][quote=“Ranger” post=57846]

Your dreaming if you think there’s a whole bunch of folks out there that really understand how our Bosch system works. [/quote]

I disagree. Perhaps there are not a lot of SpecE30 racers who understand the injection system, but I can assure you there are plenty of commercial technicians that have worked on the hundreds of thousands of Motronic systems on German and Swedish cars that understand it well. There are times that perhaps one must admit something is outside their area of comfort or expertise. I certainly don’t plan on rebuilding any transmissions; I know enough to stroke a check to Drive Gear for one of theirs when it’s needed. We’re not all going to be experts on every single aspect of these cars, nor do I personally want to be. However, I’m not afraid of teaching myself new things either. This is in my library:

Q: How many of us have had a FI problem? Follow up: How many have had a problem they couldn’t figure out with the help of this board or another forum?

Q: How many of us don’t have a shelf in the garage with spare parts to help diagnose pesky problems like these? These cars are old; we should all have a box of spare stuff.[/quote]

I have the book too. Less than 2 pages are devoted to Motronic 1.3. What I’ve learned about the inner workings of our DME I’ve learned from tuners and chippers that have pulled the maps from the chip and studied them.

There’s lots of techs that think they understand, sure. But what they really do is start replacing logical parts just like the more experienced guys among us do. Then they start replacing illogical parts. That’s a problem when the symptoms can be duplicated on demand on the street, but it becomes a helova problem when the symptoms can only be duplicated on the track.

Take a hard look at our factory service manual and see how much time it spends really explaining the inner workings of our DME. Zero. It shows you how to replace it tho.

Re. how many of us have a FI (lets call it engine management) problem? There’s always a couple folks somewhere fighting this sort of thing. Everyone’s turn will come.

Re. spare parts. Most of us have lots of “used but seem to be serviceable” spares, so what? In the absence of diagnostic logs one starts replacing logical parts. If the problem doesn’t go away you end up in pickle…

  1. It’s hard as heck to test “fixes” because “the problem” only occurs on the track and even then is intermittant.

  2. Because all your “used but seem to be serviceable” parts failed to fix the problem, you start questioning your premise that all of those used parts really were servicable. Or, what if one of those “used but serviceable” parts has a quirk that adds a second intermittant problem? Like maybe an intermittant TPS. Now you’ve got two problems but the symptoms could be so similar that you wouldn’t know that you were fighting two problems. That’d be a bastard.

Just as possible, because you’re now screwing with all sorts of parts that are really fine, the potential exists to screw something up. Like maybe the CPS’s gap doesn’t get set right, the intake boot gets cracked, the one of the little metal pipes that goes into the throttle body comes loose, or a 25yr old connector was fine now suddenly gets cranky because it was hard to unfasten and had to be twisted hard.

  1. The next step is to start replacing illogical parts and replacing “used but serviceable” with new parts as desparation increases.

All this happens because of an absence of diagnostic logs.

#36

Ranger -

There’s a decision tree here.

Q: Is it important not to piss away a weekend chasing issues?
No: Put a cage and suspension on a 200k mile street car and deal with messed up weekends as they happen.
Yes: Do the above AND install new relays, sensors and engine accessories during the build.

Q: Do you want to wrench on the car during the weekend or get faster by mining Traqmate data?
(Same choices apply)

Q: Do you have a car issue you can’t diagnose?
A: Go to a dyno iwith an expert and watch.

Except for some dynamic issues like fuel starvation, you can simulate everything you need to for, what, $100 an hour? I firmly believe that if you start with a clean tank, new pumps, hoses, filters, etc., there are no starvation issues. With new engine harness, electronics and motor accessories, I haven’t had a mechanical DNF since the first weekend (which was before we put fresh relays in).

To me, higher upfront cost and dead nuts reliability are a good trade-off. Waiting for a race weekend to chase an issue holds no appeal for me.

Megasquirt may be an interesting idea, but it is “solving” a problem that is no mystery. Might it help diagnose some issues? Sure.

Unless you are speccing one tune for everyone, it will spread the field out. Some will pay $600 to plug and play. Some will start with that box and add a few grand in tuning. I’m not familiar with the box, but I would imagine that even with a spec map there are ways to play with the inputs that might make some boxes “a little more equal” than others.

When you were throwing parts at the high RPM miss, did you take the car to the dyno?

#37

…and this is coming from a guy who painted - very well I might add - his own car with a freaking roller.

Reinventing the wheel is fine if that is your thing. It isn’t for many of us. And don’t imply that we are all Luddites that can’t understand the concept.

Why am I arguing so hard against this? Because when guys considering the class read this bullish!t they might be concerned that SE30 is some bastard child of an arms race and science fair and it will drive them away. Stable rules, large fields, cheap cars, good fun.

#38

A used harness or used DME is a roll of the dice. When one devlopes an intermittent miss or cut out, the big problem is in figuring out the cause. Because the DME can’t display live data or log data we are forced to attack the problem by swapping parts. When using used parts you have no way to know if the part you are swapping in is any better than the part you have, or even if you are swapping the the part that is the cause of the issue.

The parts of these cars are 20’ish years old now and many have degraded. One could go buy a new harness and a new DME ($2000) and have a reasonable expectation that those would not be the source of issues in the next few years. Or you can try to solve problems with used parts as most of use will do. I can assure you that what I’ve spent chasing my cut out problem well exceeds the cost of an MS, which would have revealed the cause of the problem on day one. Right now I’m on my second car, fourth engine harness, and third DME. So I was unlucky three times with the harness and twice with the DME’s. And until I rented a battery powered storage scope I was changing those parts as an action of last resort after changing eveything else (several times). Find the the thread “What have I missed” for the story of that adventure.

As an illustration of parts degradation when Chuck and I dynoed my car after the engine build we had a half dozen DME’s to pick the best from. Two of those DME’s had obvious faults in mixture control when tested on the dyo. That is a 33% fault rate on easily detectible faults. Who knows what other parts of a given DME are at the ragged edge and are causing, or will cause, a problem? One of those DME’s did cause a problem last month. My experience suggests that you have a 1 in 3 chance of finding a really good used DME. And even it may not last long.

If using a “standard tune” in the MS I don’t see how it adds complexity to the car. Then it becomes equivalent to the OE DME. The big benefits that I see are the diagnostics the MS can supply and the fact that it will have all new A/D and D/A sections.

The disadvantage is that an MS opens the door for tunes, but I’m not convinced that is a bad thing. One is only going to get just so much out of a fully legal M20B25, regardless of the tune used. But being able to tune does allow one to achieve an optimal A/F ration (which results in longer valve life as well as performance) without the monkey business we go through now to get there. The rather slight differences in performance that one can get from a real tune versus what one can do now aren’t going to give one car a decided advantage.

I could see the MS being allowed as an alternative to the OE engine management system. Perhaps with a “standard tune” that closely matches the stock tune, which isn’t hard to accomplish. That approach would be easy to enforce by downloading the tune and comparing with the standard. In comparison, there’s no easy way to check the tune of a OE DME. For someone so inclined and willing to spend the money it isn’t hard to build up a “cheater” OE DME that will pass all visual checks. But I think it more reasonable to allow “chip tuning” of the OE DME or tweaking ann MS system.

#39

[quote=“Steve D” post=57855]Ranger -

There’s a decision tree here.

Q: Is it important not to piss away a weekend chasing issues?
No: Put a cage and suspension on a 200k mile street car and deal with messed up weekends as they happen.
Yes: Do the above AND install new relays, sensors and engine accessories during the build.

Q: Do you want to wrench on the car during the weekend or get faster by mining Traqmate data?
(Same choices apply)

Q: Do you have a car issue you can’t diagnose?
A: Go to a dyno iwith an expert and watch.

Except for some dynamic issues like fuel starvation, you can simulate everything you need to for, what, $100 an hour? I firmly believe that if you start with a clean tank, new pumps, hoses, filters, etc., there are no starvation issues. With new engine harness, electronics and motor accessories, I haven’t had a mechanical DNF since the first weekend (which was before we put fresh relays in).

To me, higher upfront cost and dead nuts reliability are a good trade-off. Waiting for a race weekend to chase an issue holds no appeal for me.

Megasquirt may be an interesting idea, but it is “solving” a problem that is no mystery. Might it help diagnose some issues? Sure.

Unless you are speccing one tune for everyone, it will spread the field out. Some will pay $600 to plug and play. Some will start with that box and add a few grand in tuning. I’m not familiar with the box, but I would imagine that even with a spec map there are ways to play with the inputs that might make some boxes “a little more equal” than others.

When you were throwing parts at the high RPM miss, did you take the car to the dyno?[/quote]

You underestimate how difficult it can be to chase an intermittant problem.

Yes, I’ve used a dyno chasing problems. This occured at VIR last summer. On the 8th run we got the high rpm miss to occur. The dyno operator’s analysis. “Could be fuel. Could be ignition. Hard to say”. That was the time I strapped a fuel pressure gauge to my windshield wiper and ran laps in order to exclude FP as the problem. Ultimately I fixed it by tightening my spark plugs into the head a little tighter.

The whole “replace everything and your car will be reliable” is way optimistic. There’s always something that eventually hits you out of left field.

I don’t want to go the track and wrench. I want to drink beer and flirt with everyone’s girlfriends. Not crashing into walls would be good too. I’d also like to have diagnostic logs that can point me in the right direction when problems do occur.

Re. specing one tune. The first post addressed that. My strawman scheme has the same tune for everyone and it’s rigorously inspectable, as opposed to our current bogus visual chip check. If we find that there are ways to “game” these things, then that would be grounds for failing the idea.

#40

I’m not comfortable with the idea of open tunes. The current truth is that the tune could be easily inspectable. IMO that best fits our culture. If down the road we want to look at opening up the tune, that would be a separate issue.

I also don’t like the idea of MS devices competing with DMEs. I think that a perception would quickly be created that one of the two was superior.