- Hi guys it’s Andre from High Performance
Academy.
welcome along to this week's webinar.
Now today we're going to dive into a little
bit of information around GM idle
tuning using the HP Tuners software.
This is an area that I know a lot of tuners
struggle with, in a factory engine,
not a big deal, generally won't even
need to touch anything,
but I know a lot of people really struggle
when it comes to fitting,
particularly a large aftermarket cam.
All of a sudden they have a huge amount
of trouble getting the car to idle properly.
The car will stall or it won't start
properly when it's cold.
Al these sorts of things that really get
frustrating, particularly if you're
living with a car day in and day out as
your daily driver.
So we'll get into that once we get into
our webinar but before that,
just wanted to cover off a few things
that have happened since this time
last week.
Now I want to actually start with a couple
of Instagrams that I put up during the
week which got a little bit of conversation
going and I just wanted to dive in a little
bit deeper than it's sometimes possible to 
do when I am putting up these Instagrams.
Even with getting back to people in the
comments.
So if we head across to my laptop screen
for a moment.
And this is a shot that we took of a test
harness or a demo harness when we
were at Renvale over in the U.K.
So you can see there is a nice little
window cut in this Raychem heat shrink
or heat moulded boot on the back of
this Autosport connector.
So you can see what's going on inside.
And I'll just back off a little bit here and
actually just talk about Renvale briefly.
So Renvale, probably not a name that
a lot of us in the enthusiast market
are likely to recognise but they're a 
pretty big deal.
They currently make the wiring harnesses
for every single F1 constructor,
with the exception of Williams, and currently
with William's form, probably not one
that they're too worried about getting
onto their CV.
They're also doing harnesses for WRC,
Superbikes, basically anything that's
at the cutting edge of motorsport,
they are probably likely to be producing
the wiring harnesses for it.
So obviously they kind of know what they're
up to and they know how to make a
harness that is going to be reliable under
the vigours of motorsport use.
The thing that we do see quite often which
is represented in this Instagram quite
nicely is that in professional motorsport
harness construction it's pretty common
to see these wiring harnesses are all 
built using a single colour wire.
So in this instance, just to probably add
a little bit of colour to this one,
they've used yellow, although more often
we're going to see that the wire used
is white.
Now the reasoning behind this is that when
they are producing a lot of harnesses
in bulk, it makes it a lot easier if they've
only got to have one colour of wire
available in stock, albeit obviously they've
got the white wire in a range of different
gauges to suit the application.
So it cuts down massively on the amount
of stock that they need to keep at
their premises.
I'll just mention actually back on this
photo as well before I get roasted
by people on the internet, as often 
happens.
We can see here this opening, this 
remember is just a demo piece that
Renvale produced to put on display.
Normally what we would find is that the
actual wires beneath the boot here
will actually be covered in a gold coloured
tape which is called Kapton tape.
This is a thin insulating tape that is used,
not so much in this instance for its
insulating properties but more along
the lines of because it has a very high
temperature rating, it doesn't tend to
degrade or melt when the moulded boot
is recovered onto the back of the Autosport
connector.
So what this means is that the epoxy on
the inside of the boot won't end up
contacting the wires, meaning that if at
a later point the boot needs to be cut
off and a repair needs to be effected,
it makes it much easier to get the boot
removed and it's not going to be stuck
to the wires underneath.
Which I'm also just going to dive into a
little bit as well before we get into the
single colour theme.
So when I posted this up I had a lot of
people talk about the need to actually
repair these harnesses.
And what we do need to understand here
is that yes, a professional motorsport
wiring harness constructed in this manner
using Autosport connectors,
heat moulded boots, DR25 with
transitions, it is pretty close to
impossible to do much in the way of
repairs on these sorts of harnesses.
Now there are a couple of caveates that
we need to understand here.
First of all, the likes of Renvale, when they
are producing one of these wiring
harnesses, they're produced to a very
high standard.
So once the harness is completed, before
all of those boots are recovered into place
and everything is finalised, it is run on
what's referred to as a Hi-Pot tester.
And this Hi-Pot tester does two things.
First of all it is programmed for the 
particular harness that they are testing.
So what it means is instantly it will run
a test on the harness and ensure
that every conductor or terminal is 
in the right location.
Even when you're being as careful as
possible, it is possible sometimes
to inadvertently get a terminal in the
wrong location on one of these
Autosport connectors.
So that's the first test, it makes sure
that the harness, all of the conductors
are going to the right locations.
So essentially as long as the documentation
provided to Renvale is accurate,
then the harness will work as expected.
The other part of the Hi-Pot tester though
which is just as important, maybe even
more so, is that it will then run a high
voltage across all of these conductors,
very briefly, it's not going to do any 
damage to the conductors.
What it does it it tests for the integrity
of those conductors, making sure,
in particular that there aren't any nicks
in the insulation on a particular conductor
that may allow, or may result in problems
with breaking down under high load
later on when the harness is in service.
So once it's gone through that Hi-Pot
test, the manufacturers at Renvale
basically know that that harness is good
to go and it is going to work when it's
put in place.
Now in terms of repairing the harness 
though, in the likes of F1,
the teams really aren't that worried about
the cost of these harnesses and they
will actually replace, or most of the teams
are replacing the entire harness after
a full race weekend.
So there you go, repair not really a 
huge concern at that sort of level.
Basically if there's a fault with the harness,
the entire harness gets replaced.
You're not going to find the team cutting
into the middle of the harness if it's been
abraded through and trying to effect a
repair there.
Now moving onto the rest of that story
though, again we'll jump back to my
laptop screen and what I'll do is just
show you how the single colour
harnesses are constructed.
So Renvale use a selection of coloured
heat shrink which we can see here.
And basically when the harness is being
constructed, the little coloured heat
shrink boot pieces are placed on the 
end of the individual strands of wire
like you can see here, so this just
identifies the wires so that the person
constructing the harness knows exactly
where each wire goes, making it really
easy to ensure that each conductor,
even though they are all white,
does make it into the correct location
on the harness.
So not that tricky if you're doing this
day in and day out.
Although personally when I'm constructing
harnesses I still like to provide a little
bit of colour in there.
Particularly I use a certain colour for my
12 volt feeds, another one for my five volt
sensor feeds and another one for power
ground and sensor grounds.
So this way at a glance I kind of have a 
pretty good idea of what I've got running
in a particular area of the harness.
And beyond this of course regardless 
whether you're using coloured wire or all one
colour, documentation is the key to make it 
really easy when it you have to come back
and effect a repair or try and work out what
exactly you had designed the harness,
a certain area of the harness to do.
It's really easy to come back and look at
that documentation and then you'll know.
Alright I just want to give you a bit of 
a run down as well on our weekend.
And we are just like everyone else out there
in the motorsport industry,
we love motorsport and we try to do 
everything right as we promote with
our courses and our webinars.
However sometimes even when you do your
absolute best, things just don't go to plan.
And that was basically our weekend.
So I thought I'll just run you through what
happened.
And for the first time in a long time,
we've actually had two race cars that
are both up and running.
For those who have been following us for
a while on these pre shows,
you may have heard of the problems we
had with our black Toyota 86.
Since we fitted the six speed TTi 
sequential gearbox.
So for those who aren't aware of the car,
just give you a really brief run down,
we'll jump across to my laptop screen
for a moment.
So this is a car that we ended up purchasing
off one of our customers.
If you're interested in learning more,
check our Project Panhard on our
YouTube, there's a full build series around
the wiring and tuning of this.
But it is fitted with a Toyota 1UZFE four
litre V8.
Originally it was a stock engine.
However the owner of the car at the 
time thought it really wasn't producing
enough power so it's now fitted with a 
fairly heavily modified 1UZFE,
this time with high compression,
CNC ported heads and some pretty
aggressive cams.
Producing around about 450 horsepower,
it's also dry sump.
So that's the engine.
About, I want to say four months ago now,
we fitted a six speed sequential gearbox
into it which on face value should be a 
pretty easy modification.
However since we got the car back from
the fabricator, we had problems with
triggering.
We were seeing a lot of noise on the
trigger inputs.
And we basically came to the conclusion that
the fabricator managed to actually fry
something in the harness when he was
welding to the car.
Not 100% sure exactly what's gone on
there, a little hard to get a specific answer.
However what we've done is constructed
a new harness straight from the MoTeC
ECU out to the ref and sync inputs.
And this really goes to show just how 
important those inputs are.
The engine speed or reference input and
the synchronisation or engine position input
tell the ECU what the engine speed is and
where abouts in the engine cycle it it.
If it doesn't have this information in a 
clean format that it can understand,
then it can't calculate how much fuel to
deliver, what ignition time to deliver,
or when to deliver it.
So we're having a lot of trouble and
unfortunately this also coincided
with us being incredibly busy.
However we've got Brandon joined the
team a couple of months ago.
We got him onto the car just recently,
he rewired that, got it up and running,
wired up the strain gauge for the shifter,
so this allows us to perform clutchless
upshifts.
And because it's a strain gauge it tells
the ECU whether we're pulling back on
the sequential lever or pushing forward.
So when we pull back obviously it can
produce a fuel or ignition cut for the
upshift, just to unload the dogs in the
gearbox and allow the shift to complete.
On the downshift, it will then automatically
blip the drive by wire throttle,
allowing us to automatically match revs.
So just makes the driving experience
a little bit more seamless.
Basically takes arguably some driver skill
away but it does allow us to concentrate
particularly with the downshifting,
concentrate solely on maximising the
braking force.
So we've got that going, we also have our
RaceCraft Toyota 86 which is our original
development car with the turbo FA20.
And we were heading to the track, so we
were pretty excited.
So things started pretty poorly when we
were loading up the RaceCraft car onto
one of the trailers, this was a borrowed 
one, and the trailer broke just as we
got it loaded up.
So not to worry, we decided that Jono and
Ben would drive the RaceCraft car through
to Highlands Motorsport Park, we'd trailer
the black 86 through and everything
would be fine.
Well everything wasn't quite fine.
And about 5 minutes away from the
workshop, we got a phone call and
the RaceCraft car had broken down on the
side of the road with no fuel pressure.
So this is on my laptop screen, this is the
image that faced us when we pulled up
behind them.
To add insult to injury, while we were
hoping for a pristine day at the racetrack
with bright sun, winter here in Queenstown
wasn't quite so kind to us.
So while we were trying to diagnose on the
side of the road what exactly was going on
there, it actually started snowing.
So obviously, perfect weather to head to the
racetrack.
After a quick look on the side of the road,
we came to the conclusion we weren't
going to be able to diagnose and sort that
so we decided to carry on.
We got to the track to be faced with some
pretty uninviting weather.
So I'll jump across to my laptop screen
again.
It was pouring with rain, heaps of standing
water on the track as we can see here
in the pits.
We did have the car on slicks but we 
had a funny feeling we were going to
be faced with a bit of rain so we did
bring a full set of wets,
put those on the car and we did actually
manage to head out and get a few laps in.
Happy to say that the shifter, 
the sequential gearbox,
everything was working really really
nicely.
Although it's a little hard to tick it off
as being a job complete because with
so much rain and so much standing
water on the track, even with full slicks,
it was difficult to use much more than
about 50% or 60% throttle.
And I don't think I saw the shift light
too often so we'll be looking forward
to heading back to the track on a dry day
to really put it through its paces.
However even that car didn't quite
go to plan.
After two sessions out on the track which
probably only equated to about 15 laps,
I had a warning come up on the dash
for low voltage.
Which generally means you've got something
wrong with the alternator or charging system
on the car.
I had a quick look under the engine bay
and found that the wiring to the alternator,
the main positive feed off the alternator,
the terminal had fractured.
Which put an end to our day.
So not a great look, not an ideal situation
but unfortunately that is motorsport.
Now this probably does bring me to a 
point that's worth mentioning here.
If we look at the failed crimp join here
or failed connector, it's actually not the
crimp join that's failed.
What we can see is it's actually
fractured right through the centre.
So this is where the eyelet terminal
goes onto the main positive feed
off the back of the alternator.
Now we're really only assuming at the 
moment that this is most likely going
to be vibration related.
And this really just is a good point of
showing how much vibration can be
present in a racecar.
Now the solution to fixing this is going
to be probably to better support that
positive feed off the alternator, making
sure that it is supported so we can't
get relative movement between the
cable and that terminal where
it goes onto the alternator.
And there are a few thing we can
attach that to near to the alternator
so hopefully we'll get that back up and
running and that's not going to be
a problem in the future.
But this sort of goes a little bit deeper
as well as to why we talk quite
passionately about keeping solder away
from wiring harnesses in a motorsport
application.
There is a lot of vibration going on in a
motorsport vehicle and as you can see
there, that's caused a failure of that 
particular cable.
It does do exactly the same thing with
soldered joints as well.
You've got a lot of vibration and a lot
of relative movement that's being
caused by that vibration and solder does
have a habit of failing,
particularly at the ends of the solder
join.
So crimping there is a more reliable
technique, it's not as susceptible
to failure as a result of vibration and as
we can see, if we just pop back to that
particular image as well, this wasn't 
soldered, we can see the crimp joint
there, we've used a hydraulic crimper.
And if you are eagle eyed, you can actually
see there's sort of a hexagonal pattern
where that is crimped on.
Afterwards, this has been cut off so we
can effect this repair, this whole section
here is insulated with some Raychem
SCL just to support it and also to
insulate it from shorting out on something.
So the actual failure has happened at
the terminal itself where it's bent
through 70 or 80 degrees and again just
vibration related.
So, crimping, definitely superior but
we're still going to have to do something
to get around that problem with our
vibration.
Just wanted to talk briefly about the 
car that is sitting off to the side of me
at the moment, still bolted up to our
Mainline Hub Dyno.
And we don't do a lot of customer tuning
here at HPA, we've simply got too much
else on our plate producing content for
our courses.
However this is a favour that we've done
for a local workshop that we work quite
closely with.
But it was one that piqued by interested
as well.
So this is a Porsche 996 GT3 Cup car.
And if we just jump across to my laptop
screen, it does have a few bits that make
it a little bit unique compared to the normal
Porsche 996.
That's generally regarding the engine
compartment and if any of you out
there are Porsche fanatics you're probably
thinking that this doesn't look like the
typical Porsche engine sitting in there.
And that's exactly the case.
It's probably one of the more unique 
swaps I've heard of in a Porsche.
It's got a seven litre GM LS7 swap.
So really wholeheartedly embracing the
LS, the world kind of mantra,
is exactly what the owners of this
car have done.
They've not only fitted a Mast Motorsports
LS7 into the car, they've also fitted
in front of that, a Hollinger 6 speed 
sequential transaxle which is paddle shifted.
So pretty lethal combination, this car is
built for endurance racing here in
New Zealand where it competes in three
hour endurance events.
The team had previously run a Porsche
engine with twin turbos and had
suffered some reliability problems so
while I can't say that you couldn't
get the same sort of horsepower out 
of a turbocharged Porsche engine,
this is the way the team decided to go.
So we've got that sitting there on the
dyno and I think we've got,
yeah I've got the power figures there,
so it produced 616 horsepower at the
hubs, running out to about 7200 RPM.
So should be a pretty lethal combination,
also plenty of torque right through
the rev range there.
Now while it was on the dyno, we've
actually just filmed a little piece
that will be going on our YouTube shortly
but I just wanted to talk about the way
we can use the dyno when we are tuning
a car like this.
So for those who have joined us pretty
regularly, you'll know that we have just
taken delivery of our Mainline hub dyno.
Prior to that we had our Mainline four wheel
drive rolling road dyno.
Regardless of the type of dyno, both of these
dynos are what is referred to as a load
bearing dyno.
So they are fitted with an eddy current
power absorber.
So that eddy current power absorber 
basically has the ability to apply
a load either to the rollers or to the hubs
in the case of our hub dyno,
to control the hub speed and in turn
the engine RPM.
So this allows us to perform what's
referred to as steady state tuning.
And for any of you who have attended
one of our webinars or gone through our
courses, you will see us regularly performing
steady state tuning.
We quite often get asked how we can
keep the RPM steady.
So that's why I'm talking about this.
So basically with steady state tuning we can
set the dyno to hold a specific engine
RPM and then regardless what we do
on the throttle, the dyno will apply
more or less load to the hubs in order
to control the engine RPM, hold that
steady and that allows us to access and
individually tune specific sites in our
fuel and our ignition table.
So if we head across to our laptop screen
again, we'll just go back through and
get onto our fuel table.
So this is the MoTeC M150 that is fitted
to the Porsche 996.
And we've got the graphical view of the
fuel table out on the right hand side.
But what we can see, I've got a lot of
numbers here on our VE table.
And what I see a lot of tuners do is they'll
simply jump in the car, go straight to
full throttle and perform some wide open
throttle ramp runs.
And the problem when you're doing that
is that you're only really accessing a very
narrow area of the engine's operating
parameters.
So basically right up at wide open throttle,
full load, maybe from 2000 out to 7500 RPM.
Which is fine if you're tuning a drag car.
Doesn't make a lot of sense to be steady
state tuning a drag car.
But particularly for a street car and 
even a circuit car, we are using quite
a wide range of our fuel table and it's
important to make sure that all of the
lighter load areas and transition areas
of that table are accurately mapped.
So particularly here, what I'm concentrating
on when I'm tuning a circuit car like this
is the rev range that the engine is 
going to be using.
So obviously, yes we will be spending a
lot of time at wide open throttle,
we're also going to be spending a lot
of time off throttle when the driver's
hard under braking.
But through a corner or coming out of
a corner and just gradually easing to the
throttle, we are using different areas of
the table so we're trying to really optimise
all of those areas using steady state 
tuning.
So for example I spend a lot of time 
between about 3000 and about 5500 RPM
in the lighter load areas of the table.
Basically getting all of those individual 
sites dialled in.
We do exactly the same for the ignition
tuning, although again here with the
ignition tuning being absolutely at MBT
at part throttle's not really that critical,
generally I'll be a little bit conservative.
The reason for this is if the driver isn't
at full throttle, then the driver doesn't
need or isn't asking for full power and 
torque.
So we can be a little bit conservative
with our ignition timing.
The fuelling we want to be really accurate
with and this is going to result
in a car that once the driver's out on the
track, regardless what combination
of engine RPM and throttle position they
use, then the car is going to feel smooth,
it's going to feel responsive and it's going
to feel crisp when the driver accelerates.
The other aspect we quite often hear
people complaining about is tip in
or acceleration enrichment issues.
And while acceleration enrichment is
another topic for another day and
requires that that area of the ECU is 
dialled in correctly, quite often what I
see is people will have major problems with
the base fuelling in their fuel table
and then this in turn results in some 
problems with acceleration enrichment.
But instead of trying to fix the fuel table
they then try and add a bandaid onto it
by fixing the problems they've got with
transient response with their
acceleration enrichment.
So really it all comes down to make sure
your fuel an ignition tables are correctly
tuned first.
If you do your job properly there, you're
going to find that everything else
just becomes a lot easier.
Now I will mention here as well that 
steady state tuning isn't an option for
every dyno.
Basically I break dynos down into two
types, we either have load bearing,
where we have a power absorber module
or some way of adding load to the car.
The other type of dyno that is very 
popular, particularly in the U.S.
is the inertia style dyno.
And with an inertia style dyno, all we've
got is a large drum or roller of a known
diameter and normally they're quite heavy
as well, and basically if the dyno software
knows the diameter of the roller, the mass
of the roller, then by measuring how
quickly the roller is accelerated during a 
ramp run, the software can then calculate
power and torque.
Now they are actually really good for doing 
wide open throttle ramp runs.
They are also quite significantly cheaper
because there is no power absorber or
anything, type of brake on the dyno,
however hopefully you can understand
that there is nothing to stop the dyno
accelerating, so they're not a lot
of use for us when it comes to steady
state tuning.
Right I also wanted to mention we have
just released our newest video today
which was another one that Jono and I shot
when we were over at Goodwood Festival
of Speed.
Loving all of the F1 content that we managed
to shoot over there and this was a,
I think a '97 Williams F1 car.
And of course the technology has moved
a long way since 1997.
And one of the challenges for people 
running these particular cars in historic
or exhibition meetings is being able to
actually communicate with the ECU
and make tuning changes as required.
So we got a chance to talk to Milan from
PerSysTec who is an ex Cosworth employee
and he did a complete electronics retrofit
on this Williams F1 car.
So we talked to him about what goes
into modernising a F1 car in terms
of electronics.
In particular with this Williams,
they used a hydraulic shifted sequential
gearbox, paddle shifted gearbox.
And they had their own body control
module.
So in this instance shift requests needed
to communicate from the ECU to the
Williams body control module so there
was a lot of CAN decoding required in
order to do this.
Interesting as well that F1 were using
CAN back then, or probably well before
where in the aftermarket of course it's
only something that's become popular
with the enthusiast aftermarket much more
recently.
Probably no big surprises there.
That particular engine as well, 
we talk about the fact that in race trim
it produced around about 740 horsepower
running to 17000 RPM.
Obviously with such an expensive car and
an engine where it's hard to find parts
or even hard to get them serviced,
making maximum power is no longer
the goal so the original ECU, Milan was
able to reverse engineer the fuel and
ignition data out of that ECU so had
a good starting point with the Cosworth
ECU, but it has been significantly detuned
to the order of about 650 horsepower now.
And most importantly just dropping that
rev limit from 17400 down to about
16000, that gives a massive improvement
in the life expectancy of these engines.
So if you are on our YouTube channel,
check that video out.
If you aren't on our YouTube channel,
make sure you go and check it out,
subscribe while you're there, give that
video a thumbs up.
If you've got any questions, ask them in 
the comments, quite happy to jump in
there and do my best to answer any
questions you might have.
Lastly I also want to welcome to the HPA
crew, Scott our newest videographer.
Scott has just joined the team from 
Christchurch in New Zealand.
So around about six hours drive up the
road from us here in Queenstown.
So we're excited to have another 
videographer on board.
I know Jono's super excited because he has
been drowning in workload just for the
last few weeks.
So hopefully with another videographer
onboard, we're going to be able to
step up our production and we're looking
forward to getting Scott up to speed
and producing some great content with
him shortly.
Alright thanks for watching there guys,
I will just take a short moment here
and we'll get started with today's webinar,
thanks.
