- Hey guys, Andre from High Performance
Academy, welcome along to another one
of our webinars.
Now today we're going to be having a look
at some of the launch control techniques
we can use in race applications to try and
get nice fast consistent standing starts.
Useful for either circuit racing or drag 
racing and of course if you're that way
inclined you can also use it at a set of
traffic lights, we don't mind.
Before we get into our webinar though,
just wanted to cover off what's been going
on around HPA over the last week.
We've also got another giveaway that I'm
gonna cover off as well that's a really
exciting one, we know you guys are going
to love that.
First up we're going to carry on with our
cooling sagas on our Toyota 86.
So hopefully before this webinar started
you've been able to see our black V8 86
sitting here on our Mainline dyno.
Finally got it back up and running so we're
actually hoping Ben might be able to get this
out to the racetrack over the weekend and
put in a few laps and see if the changes
that we've put into place have made any
difference with the cooling for both the
engine as well as our diff.
Now the diff, as I touched on last week,
has been a bit of a controversial topic
after I posted up a photo on our Instagram
and instantly it got a lot of feedback from
those who follow Gale Banks' channel 
thoroughly.
So just wanted to give you a little bit more
insight into what was actually going
on there so if we head across to my
laptop screen for a moment.
This is the diff out of the back of this 
car.
Hopefully the actual crown wheel and
pinion are up to the power we're putting
through it.
It's not the most powerful engine in the
world, we're putting out around about
450 horsepower but of course this diff
originally came out of a car designed
to produce 200 horsepower so we're
definitely beating up on it pretty hard.
What you can also see here is that we have
replaced the factory Torson style LSD
with a Cusco 1.5 way clutch plate style
LSD.
And we quite often get asked about the
difference between a 1.5 way, a one way
and a two way LSD.
And simply put this is the just the action
of the LSD to lock up and supply torque
evenly I guess you could put it, to both
axles under acceleration versus braking.
And particularly with a two way LSD,
that will provide the same amount of
locking force when engine torque is
applied, also when you are hard under
brakes or engine braking.
So essentially what it tends to do is it 
locks both wheel together a little bit
under braking.
Now the drift guys tend to like this because
it helps them initiate a drift.
For us in a circuit racing application 
though this often isn't ideal because what
it tends to do is make the car want to 
push or understeer on corner entry.
So the 1.5 way LSD has different ramp
angles on the power side and the overrun
side and what this means is that under
acceleration, the diff will lock up just
like we want it to.
But on overrun it's not gonna have quite
such a vicious effect.
A one way LSD on the other hand tends to
provide no locking action on overrun at all.
So a lot of this comes down to your car
setup as well as your personal preferences.
So that's what we've got going on in 
the back here but what I really wanted
to show you was this Cusco rear diff cover.
And this is our extended billet alloy 
Cusco diff cover.
And what it does is it extends the oil
capacity or it increases the oil capacity
by about half a litre.
The problem though is what we can see
here is we kind of have this 90 degree
angle here and we obviously have exactly
the same happen down in here where
we can't see.
And Gale Banks' videos which everyone was
quite keen to show us, sort of basically his
theory is that with the oil being pushed,
let me just try and draw, pushed hard
into this corner and then it has to sort of
run off that, basically puts more work into
the oil and actually tends to create more
heat where obviously what we're trying
to do is remove the heat from the oil.
There's also some concerns around the 
ability for these aftermarket rear covers
to displace the oil and put it into the 
locations we want it, obviously we need
to lubricate that pinion gear.
And not discrediting Gale Banks' videos 
at all, his theory and also his
experimentation is really really complete so
can't argue with that.
What's important to understand though is
we can't also take one experiement on a
particular diff and then say that that's 
basically an across the board result for
every differential out there.
But the important thing to also note here
is why we really wanted this Cusco rear
diff cover is because as we can see here,
it makes it really easy for us to plumb
our oil cooler.
So we're actually not relying or not 
expecting to rely on this diff cover on its
own to keep our diff cool.
Instead what we're going to be doing is
adding an external pump and an external
oil cooler.
So this is where we're really seeing,
or expecting to see those benefits.
As we can see in here, I've also got a
little oil temp sensor.
So now we'll actually know what the diff
temp's getting to.
So a question that comes up straight 
after that is well if we didn't have a diff
temp sensor before, diff oil temp sensor,
how did we know it was overheating?
Well simply put it was pretty easy to tell
because the housing was getting so hot
that it actually began melting one of the
aftermarket bushes that holds the diff
to the chassis so that's never really a 
good sign when your nolathane bushing
is actually melting and dripping out of
the car.
Coupled with this the oil was actually 
getting so hot it was essentially boiling
and blowing out the overflow.
So after about 30 minutes of hard driving
we actually got to a point where the car
was pretty damn close to catching fire we
think.
The oil was flowing out of the overflow and
onto the exhaust and I actually stopped
driving because the car essentially filled
up with smoke.
So there's our theory as to why we think
it was getting hot.
Yeah sure it'd be nice to have some data,
which we now will have but of course,
the results were pretty conclusive.
Now what I want to show you is the sort
of diff cover that Gale Banks is advocating
we use, so this is actually a Z1 Motorsports
diff cover that's going in our 350z.
And what we can see here, this is actually
cast rather than billet and hopefully
on camera there you can see that there's
a nice smooth rounded shape to this.
So the idea here is that this will help
the oil flow up the back of the ring gear
and flow across onto the pinion.
So that's kind of probably a superior design
to the Cusco but we'll wait and see.
What we do know is that that Cusco diff
cover has been out in the wilderness for
about as long as the Toyota 86 chassis
has been.
We're certainly not hearing reports of 
people having diff failures as a result
of fitting that.
So we're prepared to roll the dice there a
little bit and just see how
that all works out.
Right give me a second here, I'll just head
back across to my notes.
Oh actually no the next thing I wanted
to talk about was on our Toyota 86
we've just also upgraded to a Motec 
C125 dash so let's head across to my
laptop screen and we'll see how that's
all going in.
Now these aftermarket dashes can be 
quite problematic to fit sometimes,
particularly on a late model car, making
them kind of neat and unobtrusive.
What we're actually using here is a product
made here in New Zealand by
Motorsport Electronics and they made 
this dash kit for the local New Zealand
Toyota 86 racing series.
And what it does is it replaces the factory
gauge cluster completely and we can
see it's a 3D printed cluster or plate I 
should say, that the C125 nicely mounts in.
It's been covered with some carbon wrap
just to give it that sort of carbon look
and then the factory plastic cover goes over
the top of that.
It all slots into the dash exactly like 
factory.
There's also a nice adaptor harness that
comes with this which literally makes
it a plug and play application.
And we've got some of the nice functions
that we can monitor through the factory
CAN bus so we can monitor things such 
as all the wheel speeds, brake pressure,
we can also monitor steering angle,
so there's some quite advanced stuff that
in a lot of cars, you're going to have to
spend a lot of money on sensors to add.
That's all available and then on an 
additional CAN bus we're getting all
of the data out of the Motec ECU that
transmits across all of the information
onto that dash.
So there we basically now have a central
logging hub so we can log the chassis data
as well as everything that's coming out
of the Motec ECU.
Now why I wanted to show you that is
because the reason we have just fitted
this dash is we will also be fitting a Motec
telemetry system.
So this is probably something a little bit
advanced at the club level of motorsport
but something we see a lot of at 
professional motorsport levels.
And we're going to be producing some
content around this for both webinars
as well as on our social media channels.
So how that works is we've got this little
transmitter, this sits in the car,
and this is a 4G, it's got a 4G sim card 
in it so this is just a cellular
modem essentially.
It connects up to our dash via ethernet
and then is just powered and it's got
an external aerial so that transmits the
data and then we have a Motec T2
receiver which sits in the pits.
And this again has a sim card in it so
it's a cellular modem receiving all of
that data and this transmits to our PC,
and then we can view the data live
as the car's going around the track.
Now the nice function with this is it 
allows someone in the pits,
hopefully a data engineer, to actually
monitor everything and if something's
starting to go outside of normal operating
parameters this allows them to inform
the driver and again really this just comes
back to allowing the driver to concentrate
on his or her job and drive the car.
And not really worry about what's actually
happening with the car.
So again we'll have that in hopefully in the
not too distant future and we'll keep
up to date with our progress there.
Now another thing I wanted to talk about
is we are expecting a new addition
to the HPA vehicle fleet in the not too
distant future.
We are going, we're still sort of up in the
air about it, we are looking at purchasing
a Subaru version seven STi Spec c RA.
Now we've been asked for quite a long
time now for some more content around
open source reflashing and the Subaru
platform is very very popular both here
as well as overseas so this is gonna be
a perfect candidate for some reflash
webinar content, some reflash practical
worked example, and then we're also gonna
have the ability to run aftermarket 
standalone ECUs in that car as well
so this will probably become our workhorse
for a little while, while we're waiting
for our 350z to get back up and running,
for some of our public webinars.
So again we'll keep you up to date with 
that.
We have just started a new giveaway
and this is one that we know is gonna
go down really really well.
We have done one with Haltech 
previously and it was very popular.
This time for the next couple of weeks
we are giving away a Haltech Elite 950.
Along with the Haltech WB1 wideband
CAN controller.
So I'm just gonna talk about these two
products for a second and then I'll tell
you how you can get involved.
So first of all the Haltech Elite 950,
and there are a fair few products in the
Haltech Elite range.
We've been using the 2500 which is the
top of the line in our Nissan 350z for
a few years now for our webinars.
The 950 is aimed for those people with
eight cylinder or up to eight cylinder
engines so we've got eight injector and
eight ignition outputs.
It's a pretty advanced ECU running all 
of the Haltech Elite software
and software features that we've already
demonstrated through our webinars.
In particular one of the nice functions
with the Haltech Elite is the self learning
funcationality.
This applies to a variety of different 
aspects of the ECU's operation.
One of the key ones there that I made
use of quite a lot on our 350z is the
self tuning of the fuel map.
So how this works is it basically looks at
your target air fuel ratio map and it looks
at the actual air fuel ratio coming in 
from the wideband air fuel ratio sensor.
Any time there's an error it basically
applies a short term fuel trim into
a table so we've got a three dimensional
table, so it's not applying an overall trim.
That trim is dependent on load and RPM.
So basically you can take your car out
or on the dyno, drive it and allow the
self learning to make corrections and then
once the correction map is fully developed,
you can then apply that to your main fuel
map.
It actually works really really well.
I will warn though that these auto tune
or self learning functions, they still
aren't a bandaid for not tuning your car
properly in the first place.
And you certainly can't expect to plug the
ECU in with no base map,
go for a drive on the racetrack and expect
everything to be fine.
It's not quite like that.
But what it does do is a really good job 
of making small adjustments if there
are some errors in your map and then
of course the ability to apply those to
your main fuel map makes things really
really easy.
Alright the other product there is the new
CAN based wideband controller.
So this is something we actually saw when
we were over at Haltech at World Time Attack
last year in October.
It was a product that wasn't quite released
then so we weren't allowed to talk about it.
CAN based wideband, if anyone's followed
us for a while you'll probably know that
I am a huge fan of these.
Traditionally the old school wideband
controllers were all analog voltage
output devices and what this results in
is a zero to five volt output generally
that is scaled across your air fuel ratio
range.
Problem though is that this is very sensitive
to any ground offsets.
Very easy to have a ground offset when
you're wiring these in.
If you have that and you don't know about
it, it's going to mean that there's big
inaccuracies in the actual air fuel ratio
data that your ECU is seeing.
Obviously when we're looking at 
something as critical as the air fuel ratio,
we don't want any error to creep in.
So the CAN based unit on the other hand,
ensures the integrity of all of that data
because the air fuel ratio data is 
transmitted over a two wire CAN bus.
So there's no chance of voltage offsets
upsetting that.
This particular unit, waterproof as well,
it is potted, you can mount it somewhere
in the engine bay and it just connects via
the four pin plug CAN harness,
that's pretty common in Haltech products.
Uses the Bosch LSU 4.9 lambda sensor
which again is pretty popular,
pretty common in most aftermarket
ECUs now.
On top of this we are also including one
of Haltech's premium unterminated
engine harness kits.
So this goes from the ECU out to your
engine.
It does require some wiring, as it says,
it's unterminated.
So this allows you to modify and make that
harness up to suit.
The premium kit though does have a 
couple of nice features.
First of all there is a built in relay box.
So you don't have to go and wire in 
additional relays and fuses,
which is probably one of the more time
consuming parts of building
a custom harness and there's also a nice
firewall grommet where that harness
is gonna pass through your firewall out
into the engine bay.
Now it's actually probably a good time 
to just talk really briefly about the
options you've got when it comes to 
installing one of these ECUs in your car.
So obviously that is one option where
you want to build your own harness.
This allows a lot of flexibility in making
the harness exactly what you want it to be.
However it is time consuming and if
you are working on a popular engine
then Haltech also offer terminated 
harnesses for these popular engines.
So this comes with all of the connectors
on the harness already.
It's nicely sheathed, it all looks 
professional and it's then pretty close
to plug and play.
You'll still have to hook up power and 
grounds et cetera but it does make
installing an aftermarket ECU really
easy if you are running one of those
engines that is supported.
And then the last option is again for a 
few popular vehicles there are plug and
play adaptor harnesses.
So these are a short adapter harness that
goes between your Haltech Elite ECU
and the factory ECU header plug so this 
really does literally make it into
a plug and play affair.
One thing I'll just talk about here if you
are choosing between these,
a lot of people ask us well why should 
I go for one over the other?
In general what I would say is if you're
looking at a relatively standard installation
and your factory harness is in good 
condition, then if you have the option of
a plug and play adapter harness, that's your
quickest, cheapest and easiest way
to get up and running.
However on a lot of the popular engines now,
let's say SR20s, maybe RB series engines,
they are quite old now and the factory 
harness can end up deteriorating
because of the heat in the engine bay.
So often in these cases you may actually be
better to replace your factory harness,
because you can get reliability problems
that come in because the connectors
have all become brittle and fallen apart.
Alright I've talked way too much about
this product but it is a great giveaway,
we are also pairing it up with our engine
tuning starter package,
that gives you our EFI tuning fundamentals,
understanding air fuel ratio course,
our practical standalone tuning course,
and membership to our private online
community and you can get your name 
into the draw by heading along to the
link that the guys will drop into the 
comments now.
This giveaway has only been running for 
a few days but plenty of time to get
in there, but why not do it right now.
There are a few other options you can
go through as well to give yourself a
few more entries into that draw as 
well if you follow the simple instructions
on that link.
RIght if we head across to my laptop 
screen for a second, this is an Instagram
that I put up a few days ago and I just
wanted to talk about this just briefly
because we did get a few comments on
our Facebook page actually in particular,
not so much on our Instagram about this.
So we have gone here on our SR20 
VE engine that's in our 350z,
we have chosen a Bosch Motorsport
drive by wire throttle body.
Obviously the SR20, this generation,
traditionally uses a cable throttle.
But we've gone to drive by wire throttle
and there are a couple of reasons for this,
but before I get into those reasons,
when we talk about drive by wire throttle,
we automatically end up getting a few
people ask us about the downsides
of drive by wire throttle, thinking that
drive by wire is laggy and potentially unsafe.
And I just wanted to clear that up because
it really isn't the case.
Often a lot of people think that drive
by wire results in some lag because they've
driven an older generation factory drive
by wire car and it had a mushy kind
of feel to the throttle response.
Now that's really a case of the factory
tuning as opposed to any limitations with
the hardware.
So really these days, particularly with 
aftermarket ECUs running drive by wire
throttle, there really is no limitation,
there is no lag or latency that you're
going to actually notice.
For all intents and purposes, the drive by
wire throttle body can essentially move just
as quickly as you can move your foot on
the throttle.
In terms of safety as well, these are 
incredibly safe, and I would say that
there are almost certainly more accidents
and deaths have occured because of a
cable throttle that has become jammed,
than a drive by wire throttle body
that's gone out of control.
The reason for this is there are some really
smart safety strategies in the ECU.
The ECU tracks the throttle position,
it also tracks the throttle target.
And if those two don't match really
carefully, it has the ability to run into
a limp home mode where it can instigate
a low engine RPM limiter just to prevent
the engine running away if the throttle
ends up jammed at wide open throttle.
In both the driver's foot pedal as well as
the throttle position as well,
there are double sensors, so there's two
sensors in each place, and these basically
give redundancy.
Essentially if both of those sensors don't
match, then again the ECU knows
something's wrong so actually incredibly
safe.
Now why we've chosen this for our
350z is because drive by wire throttle
allows us to really easily tailor the 
throttle opening to our target preference.
So what this means is we don't necessarily
have to stick to a linear translation
between our driver's foot pedal position
and what the throttle's actually doing.
And this, particularly with a high powered
turbocharged four cylinder engine,
allows the flexibility to change the torque
output to suit the driver's preference
and the amount of traction available.
Hopefully what that's gonna mean is that
we can produce a car that's much easier
to drive, particularly when traction is 
limited and we can also have multiple
throttle maps as well.
So we can have one for dry track and
then one for a wet track.
So we can just dull down that throttle
response and get to make the car
a little bit more drivable.
Last thing is we are also going to be 
using this to provide auto blipping
on the downshift for our downshifting
using a sequential gearbox.
So that just allows again the driver
to concentrate solely on actually
controlling the car and the driver's not
gonna have to worry about manually
blipping the throttle in order to match
revs.
Alright last but certainly not least,
if we just head across to my laptop
screen again, while we were at PRI this
year we managed to get the chance
to chat to Aaron from Bully Dog.
And this is something that's causing a lot
of controversy out there in the
aftermarket at the moment, particularly 
with diesel tuning obviously,
is the removal of a diesel particulate
filter or DPF.
These are an emissions control device,
the DPF is there to remove diesel
particulate matter out of the exhaust.
So basically reduce the smoke output
from diesel engines, one of the downsides
of a diesel engine.
So we're seeing a lot of tuners and
enthusiasts these days removing
the diesel particulate filters from their
vehicles thinking that they're going
to gain power and generally what this
is actually doing is causing a whole bunch
of problems with diagnostic trouble codes.
So what we do in this video is we talk
to Aaron and find out a little bit about
the actual reality of whether you're going
to gain performance with removing the DPF
and we talk about their aftermarket 
motorsport orientated diesel
particulate filters, so these flow better
than factory and they're also interestingly
a little bit cheaper as well.
So if you're interested in finding out a 
little bit more about that,
head across to our YouTube channel and
while you're there, make sure you subscribe.
Alright guys, give me a few moments here
and we'll get started with today's webinar.
