Word of warning if you don't have time and a full coffee skip to the last paragraph.
I'm not so well known among the Lotus circles so you can take me for a grumpy old man who despite that does know a thing or two. I've worked as an engine tuner for a decade now, built a number of engines and parts too. Also spent the last 5 years subcontracting out working for OEMs and certain aftermarket companies on their ECUs. My background is in computer engineering and I specifically work with embedded firmware. Having worked on designs, testing and tuning for OEMs I know EFI, wiring and tuning very well.
I was subcontracted by a company in my region as they had purchased an upgrade kit from a company called ForceFed. This was a kit that consisted of an EFI ECU, a custom harness, a smaller supercharger pulley and 550cc injectors. The kit was supposed to be shipped with a decent base map and I was contracted to fine tune it.
Stock the car put down a respectable 219whp on 94 octane fuel.
I was called in a number of times during the install because the instructions with the kit were somewhere between cryptic and useless. There was not a lot of explaining besides something like cut the yellow wire and attach it here. There were a lot of interesting oversights with the wiring, for example, switched power was supposed to be wired up to the fuel pump but that always stays energized for 4 seconds after KO on this car. The instructions also placed the ECU in an impossible place. It doesn't exist on this car!
I put in a large number of phone calls to ForceFed looking for technical support. I wasted a few afternoons calling repeatedly and getting only an answering machine. I left messages but nobody would ever call back. Finally after many tries I got someone on the phone to help. He was able to help with some questions but many were clearly outside his expertise. Generally the answers came out like "oh yeah, that's wrong" or "oh that doesn't apply to your car" or "well I don't know, DRS designed it you could try them."
So I set out trying to contact DRS. Took 5-10 tries before I finally got in touch with someone who knew something - apparently the designer of this kit. In short the answer was along the lines of "well someone butchered the kit up to meet their price points". Apparently I need the DBW amp for this car. No worries, they'd email me an updated calibration file that would fix my issues.
So the ECU was to be installed under the wheel. With my experience in building, tuning and testing OEM systems and race cars I was like WHAT? We're going to put a non-weatherproof $5k unit THERE??? I'm not going to have my name associated with an install that konks out after driving through the first puddle! Out of frustration I directed the shop to get me a holesaw and we extended the MAP wire and installed the ECU in the trunk where it would stay dry!
With all that installed and the ForceFed provided basemap we tried to start the car. It immediately choked us out of the shop and fouled the plugs. The wideband was pegged at 10.2. Another call to DRS and oh sorry, we'll send you that updated calibration file. I verified all the wiring and sensor values to be sure. The sensor calibrations were completely wrong. 10 more phone calls, and 2 afternoons of "Sorry XXX is at the track/not in/tuning a car/picking his nose today. Ok, I made up the picking his nose part... the answer I got - yeah don't worry about that, it just doesn't show the right values but it should start fine. I asked again for the updated calibration file. Also sent follow up email and calling back left a few messages.
I've built and tuned a number of 1ZZ's and given the forced induction and compression ratio I was very leery about the base map's timing - it was very very aggressive. After much testing I started tweaking their settings to get somewhat reliable starts. Maybe it works OK if you live in CA and every day your engine will be cranking at 80F but up here in Canada where the car was more like 50C we just created a new hole in the ozone layer from all that unburned fuel!
Talk about frustrating!
Finally a friend of a friend gave me the name and number of TurboPhil here and I decided to give him a call out of desperation. If I billed every hour spent this poor client would have paid 3x the value of the kit. Unlike the company who made the kit and unlike that which designed the kit Phil was available, helpful and knowledgeable. He directed me to a firmware update, wiring change so VVTI was properly supported and sent me a map to start with. While it wasn't perfect it was a lot closer to working than the original one I was provided with by the manufacturer of the kit. The few things that did not work correctly were quickly found and pretty near all his suggestions were right on.
Turns out the factory ECU was trying to achieve an idle but was tripping the accel enrichments every time it moved the throttle plate. The kit designers had decided to hook up to the slave TPS rather than the primary and the EFI ECU (Race 1.2) was not designed to run a street car so the settings available were severely limited. I would have preferred to trigger off the requested throttle movement rather than the resulting one even though neither is ideal in this situation. One thing I always focus on is driveability. Nothing says "good tuning" in car that doesn't start easily or idle smoothly.
The car had to be delivered today but I've spent the last 3 days calling EFI trying to find out if their water temp compensation affects the cranking pulsewidth. Still no answer from them. Yes it starts OK but still not up to my standards.
Final result 251whp (mustang dyno).
So to sum it all up, lots of coin was spent on the kit. As a technical representative to the client I found the support was disgusting - availability, NIL, callbacks NIL. The kit was not very bolt-on, the instructions were wrong, incomplete and very very poor. Phil on the other hand, thumbs up to you and your company BOE - you did a better job of supporting someone who wasn't even your customer... yet. Next client who asks - we'll be looking at selling them one of your kits.
-Michael
I'm not so well known among the Lotus circles so you can take me for a grumpy old man who despite that does know a thing or two. I've worked as an engine tuner for a decade now, built a number of engines and parts too. Also spent the last 5 years subcontracting out working for OEMs and certain aftermarket companies on their ECUs. My background is in computer engineering and I specifically work with embedded firmware. Having worked on designs, testing and tuning for OEMs I know EFI, wiring and tuning very well.
I was subcontracted by a company in my region as they had purchased an upgrade kit from a company called ForceFed. This was a kit that consisted of an EFI ECU, a custom harness, a smaller supercharger pulley and 550cc injectors. The kit was supposed to be shipped with a decent base map and I was contracted to fine tune it.
Stock the car put down a respectable 219whp on 94 octane fuel.
I was called in a number of times during the install because the instructions with the kit were somewhere between cryptic and useless. There was not a lot of explaining besides something like cut the yellow wire and attach it here. There were a lot of interesting oversights with the wiring, for example, switched power was supposed to be wired up to the fuel pump but that always stays energized for 4 seconds after KO on this car. The instructions also placed the ECU in an impossible place. It doesn't exist on this car!
I put in a large number of phone calls to ForceFed looking for technical support. I wasted a few afternoons calling repeatedly and getting only an answering machine. I left messages but nobody would ever call back. Finally after many tries I got someone on the phone to help. He was able to help with some questions but many were clearly outside his expertise. Generally the answers came out like "oh yeah, that's wrong" or "oh that doesn't apply to your car" or "well I don't know, DRS designed it you could try them."
So I set out trying to contact DRS. Took 5-10 tries before I finally got in touch with someone who knew something - apparently the designer of this kit. In short the answer was along the lines of "well someone butchered the kit up to meet their price points". Apparently I need the DBW amp for this car. No worries, they'd email me an updated calibration file that would fix my issues.
So the ECU was to be installed under the wheel. With my experience in building, tuning and testing OEM systems and race cars I was like WHAT? We're going to put a non-weatherproof $5k unit THERE??? I'm not going to have my name associated with an install that konks out after driving through the first puddle! Out of frustration I directed the shop to get me a holesaw and we extended the MAP wire and installed the ECU in the trunk where it would stay dry!
With all that installed and the ForceFed provided basemap we tried to start the car. It immediately choked us out of the shop and fouled the plugs. The wideband was pegged at 10.2. Another call to DRS and oh sorry, we'll send you that updated calibration file. I verified all the wiring and sensor values to be sure. The sensor calibrations were completely wrong. 10 more phone calls, and 2 afternoons of "Sorry XXX is at the track/not in/tuning a car/picking his nose today. Ok, I made up the picking his nose part... the answer I got - yeah don't worry about that, it just doesn't show the right values but it should start fine. I asked again for the updated calibration file. Also sent follow up email and calling back left a few messages.
I've built and tuned a number of 1ZZ's and given the forced induction and compression ratio I was very leery about the base map's timing - it was very very aggressive. After much testing I started tweaking their settings to get somewhat reliable starts. Maybe it works OK if you live in CA and every day your engine will be cranking at 80F but up here in Canada where the car was more like 50C we just created a new hole in the ozone layer from all that unburned fuel!
Talk about frustrating!
Finally a friend of a friend gave me the name and number of TurboPhil here and I decided to give him a call out of desperation. If I billed every hour spent this poor client would have paid 3x the value of the kit. Unlike the company who made the kit and unlike that which designed the kit Phil was available, helpful and knowledgeable. He directed me to a firmware update, wiring change so VVTI was properly supported and sent me a map to start with. While it wasn't perfect it was a lot closer to working than the original one I was provided with by the manufacturer of the kit. The few things that did not work correctly were quickly found and pretty near all his suggestions were right on.
Turns out the factory ECU was trying to achieve an idle but was tripping the accel enrichments every time it moved the throttle plate. The kit designers had decided to hook up to the slave TPS rather than the primary and the EFI ECU (Race 1.2) was not designed to run a street car so the settings available were severely limited. I would have preferred to trigger off the requested throttle movement rather than the resulting one even though neither is ideal in this situation. One thing I always focus on is driveability. Nothing says "good tuning" in car that doesn't start easily or idle smoothly.
The car had to be delivered today but I've spent the last 3 days calling EFI trying to find out if their water temp compensation affects the cranking pulsewidth. Still no answer from them. Yes it starts OK but still not up to my standards.
Final result 251whp (mustang dyno).
So to sum it all up, lots of coin was spent on the kit. As a technical representative to the client I found the support was disgusting - availability, NIL, callbacks NIL. The kit was not very bolt-on, the instructions were wrong, incomplete and very very poor. Phil on the other hand, thumbs up to you and your company BOE - you did a better job of supporting someone who wasn't even your customer... yet. Next client who asks - we'll be looking at selling them one of your kits.
-Michael
