What have you done to your car today?

MORE SPEED said:
What did you use to do this?
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Just some Autosol with clean soft cloths (one to put on, one to polish after). My exhaust is a stainless system and it's just some soot chucked out from the car running a bit rich and I've cleaned it a few times before so it's quick and easy to keep clean.
If you've got really baked on soot/grime then I don't know what the best option is, I'm sure someone in the car cleaning thread would know though.
 
Modified it. I've owned it for four years, and I honestly cant think of anything I want to replace it with, but I did have two issues with the car - the infamous "torque dip" which made the car feel flat right in the mid range, and the fact that it didn't sound particularly characterful when worked hard.

After lots of research into the various manifold/exhaust options which are said to fix these problems, today I took it to Abbey Motorsport and had an ACE CS400 manifold and high flow CAT fitted, then the car was remapped.

Results? Fantastic :D The torque dip is now gone and as a result, the car feels so much more responsive and urgent in the midrange. It's still not a powerful car, but giving it a much more linear torque curve means that it now pulls in a more linear fashion to the redline, without feeling flat and lifeless from 3 - 4.5KRPM. It's added maybe 10% peak power; not all that bad for NA tuning, I don't think.

And to add to that, the car now gives quite a nice raspy tone when worked hard, giving you an incentive to rev the engine out. The remap is an Ecutek remap, which also adds flat foot shifting and auto-blip on downshift, but I doubt I'll be using the maps where they are activated. You can also get a launch control feature, but I elected not to bother with this. I doubt I'll use the other two either to be honest, but they might be nice to play with occasionally.

Very happy with the results, it's given the car a new lease of life for me :)

Sorry, I only have paper printouts and no scanner, so you'll have to make do with a photo of them :)
Green line - Stock car.
Red Line - Post manifold/remap. Note that the the big dip around 4K RPM is gone and torque has been lifted throughout the whole rev range.
uhmLj9A.jpg

Not my car, but this is a video of exactly the same setup
 
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Over 10% gain in peak power, but more importantly the huge gap between stock and the new setup all through the rev range over 3k. I bet that makes a ton of difference.

With a number of NA cars the manifold and accompanying remap seems the best way of extracting 10-20% extra performance without going FI.
 
Marvin said:
Over 10% gain in peak power, but more importantly the huge gap between stock and the new setup all through the rev range over 3k. I bet that makes a ton of difference.

With a number of NA cars the manifold and accompanying remap seems the best way of extracting 10-20% extra performance without going FI.
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Definitely... the extra peak power is nice but getting rid of that void in the mid-range has made a huge difference to how the car feels.
 
Frozennova said:
600ft/lbs and 178bhp must be a rare diesel one :p

I wonder why they didn't do the torque multiplication correction on the torque only the power
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It might because what we really wanted to achieve was just to flatten the torque curve, so looking at peak figures arent as helpful as just seeing the comparison after the mapping. I'm not sure to be honest, I'm no authority on dyno testing. Mark at Abbey definitely knows his stuff though, and spent a lot of time tweaking the map and testing to make sure it was right.
 
Conscript said:
It might because what we really wanted to achieve was just to flatten the torque curve, so looking at peak figures arent as helpful as just seeing the comparison after the mapping. I'm not sure to be honest, I'm no authority on dyno testing. Mark at Abbey definitely knows his stuff though, and spent a lot of time tweaking the map and testing to make sure it was right.
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That's all that really matters anyway, and its a fantastic improvement to mid range torque especially when consider the torque dip is largely cause by inlet manifold design

Edit: Converted to meaningful numbers the peak torque figures are 116ft-lbs/148ft-lbs so for N/A tuning pretty massive gains
 
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