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A few of us lucky tuners were able to get our hands on the Beta ECUTEK ProECU software to tune the new BRZ and FR-S. ECUTEK is a UK company that has been reverse engineering ECU's(Engine Control Units) in Subaru's for 10 years now. This is as long as we have been building parts for Subaru's so by no means are they new to the tuning world.
Since June 27th at about 11am, we have been testing and tuning working through bugs and getting the ECUTEK ProECU software up and running. We started by flashing all three of our cars (2 BRZ's, and 1 FR-S) with the ECUTEK licenses to ensure all our cars ECU types were in the software and ready to tune anytime.
With all our cars ready to be tuned, we decided to give some love to our FR-S first. The first few hours we had with the car, we spent messing around with how the software works, checking out all the hundereds of maps, and putting a plan together as to what to test out the following day. Most of the time was spent datalogging and seeing what the ECU is telling us is going on.
Thursday, we dynoed the car with a baseline run of 165 Wheel HP and started tuning. There are a few key maps that have the "Torque Dip" shape built into them and we started playing with some of those first trying to eliminate the dip. While we were not able to eliminate it, we did make it better and not as wide as it was before. But we are not giving up just yet. There are hundreds of maps to explore and one of these is bound to help make this go away.
The 5-6 ft-lbs of torque we gained almost everywhere and the solid 10 Wheel HP gained from 6500 to 7600 (yes not 7300) well makes up for the weird torque dip. The car feels exactly like it did before, but faster, which is what we all wanted. Also its nice having a few hundred more RPM to shift. This keeps the car in the power band and less chance of it dipping into the TQ dip.
So is there more HP to be gained on a stock car? For sure there is! As the software gets more and more developed, and our experience with the this new motor grows, I think there is more HP to gain. Every day there are new parameters we are able to log, and new maps to test out, so the future is looking very good! That and the graph above isn' the highest HP we saw......
Stage 1 mapping should be nailed down in the next upcoming weeks. This is mapping designed for a completely stock car running anything up to a catback exhaust (doens't require a tune). User ProECU setups and mapping for customers should be available soon along with details about exactly what they will come with and how they will work.
As you can see that the initial dyno results are very good, and keep in mind that this is a stock car and initial tuning. There is for sure more power to unlock from these cars!
