WASCC Tuning Day - 19th April 2011

Today I attended yet another WASCC tuning day at Barbagallo and as it turned out it was one of the better days thus far ! Here is why ...

I woke up early and jumped into my car and drove some 40kms north to the circuit. On my way there I stopped at BP to put some high octane fuel into my newly acquired 20L jerry can and left my car's tank at around 50% hoping for a lighter run.

Once I arrived I bumped into Aaron who was just getting his EG Civic ready and so both of us started to prep our cars.

There was only 1 car on the track, the weather wasn't too hot and there was no wind. I quickly adjusted my rear suspension to a setting of 4/7, turned my video camera on and went out !

After a warm up lap and a few hot laps I clocked 1'09''36 comfortably beating my last year's record of 1'10''20 ! Here is a snapshot of the times in my 1st stint.

So what was different ? Firstly, a clear track (literally no traffic), a lighter car with only 45% of the tank of fuel onboard and 3rdly a MUGEN ECU and its fantastic 6000rpm VTEC switchover point ! There was also the fact that I drove faster in that lap exceeding 191km/h. This new ECU has a distinctive behaviour in that it seems to be feeding a lot more fuel into the engine (very fuel hungry!) and with a sooner VTEC switchover you can feel a distinct rush of acceleration. Redline remains unchanged.

In my 2nd stint I was fighting a lot more traffic and it seemed like on two of my hot laps (lap 4 and 6) where I was on the way to beating the above time there was always some slower car in the way. I wouldn't have minded if it had been on a straight but it was always around corners where safety had to take precedence.

Another issue I experienced was fuel starvation going up hill from the back hairpin and whenever I had less than 25% of petrol in my tank. Unfortunately I didn't top up enough to avoid this :( Perhaps a new fuel pump is needed for these scenarios ?

Here are results from my 2nd and final stint.

Anyway good day today ! Good results and the car survived and worked as expected.
I'll be changing my engine oil and transmission fluid next and probably won't hit the track until June when the weather is nice and cool !

I'll leave you with a photo of the ECU after it was all over.

Video is coming soon ...

-Rod