Thats one of the minor changes I made to Nicks evo and he went from a 13.3 to a 12.7 with a flash. Apparently it helped, but like I said we havent logged it to see what its doing for sure. I have logged my MR many times and never once had this 4th gear AFR issue.

 

Well that's good to hear. I guarantee this is what is responsible for my sluggish track times.

 

I tried the same thing on a friends car (put the 05 open loop load maps on his 03) Although it might have gotten the car to run a more consistent AFR in 4th, it also introduced a bit more knock.. I was concerned about it, only it looked like it was happening when he was shifting. Previously his knock was a low count, but sustained long enough that repeated counts fell into the decay of the previous, which would alter the Octane number (and shift the tune).. When I used the 05 Open loop load values, the octane number didn't change.

Understand that its pretty much impossible to eliminate knock in real world (and track) conditions. Your best bet is to mitigate it as much as possible by giving the car a safe tune, keeping your low octane maps conservative, and only using enough boost that is safe for your fuel quality..

I'm pretty sure that was the purpose of these load maps, and you may not want to alter them by much, unless its absolutely necessary and you aren't getting unacceptable levels of knock.

 

Well, running leaner will improve the times, especially if it was tuned for the AFR, but in my experience, in 4th gear, load was alot higher than in third, and therefore experienced more knock if I didn't richen things up a bit.. There's the possibility that the ECU isn't recognizing the additional load in the maps, and therefore required this Open Loop Load map.. I did notice in my logging that my third gear MAF reading, and 4th gear MAF reading were similar, and not much higher.. So unless it calculates load with this in mind, you might be in similar load cells.. It seems like first/second, third/fourth, and 5th I grouped 1/2 and 3/4 together since they seem to share load cells, 5th seems to be on its own.. However if your tuning for third, and you may have to refine the tune to improve 1/2 performance (though it shares about 80% of the load cells)

This is something to keep in mind when tuning, and again, I suspect this may be the reason for those load maps.

 

Thanks for all the info malibujack. What you're saying makes plenty of sense.

However, the kind of leaps in AFR between 2nd, 3rd and 4th gear that I am experiencing are resulting in AFRs that are drowing out my system. I'll see 11.9 in 2nd, 11.2 in 3rd, and a contsistant 10.0 in 4th.

I'm all for running a conservative AFR for a safe tune to minimize detonation, but a mixture of 10.0 isn't healthy for the vehicle either. The guy I have tuning my car on thursday is supposed to be alleviating this load problem throughout my gears and tweaking my ignition timing. Hopefully, this will result in some faster times and an overall more efficient and safe tune.

 

I got my ecu reflashed today while doing some street tuning. The guy who did the flash for me was really helpful and really knew his stuff. He made two main changes from Al's mail-in flash that I was previously running on. The first major change was the timing curve. For some reason, the timing was way off and I was getting very very little timing advance. The second change that was made was with the load parameters. Now, my afrs are consistent from 1st gear through 5th gear instead of drasitically richening up as load increases.

I can't even explain what a difference this makes...it feels like a totally different car now