Practical Reflash Tuning: Step 6: Confirm Calibration on the Road

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Step 6: Confirm Calibration on the Road

07.48

00:00	Alright, we've got the car off the dyno now and we're going to take it for a test under real world conditions, make sure that everything we saw on the dyno does in fact stack up.
00:08	And we're going to do this in two separate ways.
00:10	First of all, what I'm going to do is just head out on the road and just drive the car normally, under cruise, part throttle conditions and I'm going to be noting what the car drives like, if it's smooth or if there's any erratic aspects, any hesitations.
00:24	It can be helpful to also keep a notepad with you, so you can note down any areas that you feel aren't quite right, noting down your RPM and sort of what throttle and load you're at when that problem occurred.
00:36	The other aspect we're going to be doing of course is logging all of this, so that we can then have a better look at what our mass airflow sensor calibration is like out in the real world.
00:46	Once we're comfortable with that, we're also going to log a full power acceleration run and we're going to be making sure again our fuelling is on point, our trims are in control and also that we don't have any knock occurring that we weren't seeing on the dyno.
01:00	So, let's get underway now, we'll head out onto the road.
01:04	A good idea to always allow our heat soap to disperse before we actually start logging so, we're getting realistic values, but let's head out and get things started now.
01:13	Doesn't help here that we are in a reasonably heavily built up industrial area.
01:18	So, not a lot of open road that I can use for this testing, but that's OK, we'll make the best of what we've got.
01:27	These are of course real world conditions.
01:30	At the moment just sensing how the car's driving, it's nice and smooth, the response to throttle input is great, really at this stage wouldn't know that this is even a modified car.
01:41	So, at the moment I'm just sort of coming up between sort of about 2000 and 4000 RPM, just the areas that we would normally expect to be using under cruise conditions.
01:51	Again everything's feeling really really good here.
01:55	The amount of data we gather is really up to how long we've got available.
02:01	We don't necessarily need to drive the car around for hours in order to gather some data to confirm what our tune is doing.
02:10	But in this case we'll just continue for a little bit longer, get a little bit more data and then stop on the side of the road and see what we've actually got.
02:17	Of course, just as with our dyno work, when we are trying to get some data to check out how well our mass air flow sensor calibration is working out, we do want to be mindful of driving smoothly.
02:32	So, erratic throttle input of course is always going to be problematic with acceleration enrichment.
02:38	Alright, let's pull over and we'll have a look at the data we've got now and see what we can learn.
02:42	OK, so the first thing I want to have a look at here is our closed loop graph.
02:47	And basically looking at where our total trim is throughout this.
02:51	And just clicking through here, it's looking pretty good.
02:54	We've got positive 5% in a couple of places, but for the most part it's pretty good.
02:59	Let's have a look at that using our XY graph.
03:03	OK, so we can see the data that we've gathered there only goes out to around about 70 grams per second there.
03:10	Of course, that does encompass our cruise area, so exactly as expected.
03:15	We can sort of see our trend line there sitting pretty much right on zero.
03:18	So, no work to be done there, really happy with it.
03:21	Let's close down our XY graph and we'll also just have a look at our knock.
03:26	Not really expecting too much problem under the cruise conditions.
03:29	And we can see we do have a little bit of activity which always interestingly is from cylinder three.
03:35	But yeah nothing particularly under these cruise conditions, part throttle, definitely not something I'm going to be particularly worried about here.
03:43	Only really got into a little bit of positive boost there a couple of times.
03:48	So, yeah not an issue there as we'd expect.
03:51	What we're going to do now is head back out and we'll do a full power, full throttle acceleration run.
03:57	Try and do this in third gear.
03:58	Obviously, I need to be a little bit mindful of speed limits here, we are on a public road but we realistically do want to use at least third if not fourth gear to really put proper decent load on the car, on the engine.
04:11	And of course if we try and do this in second gear, we're almost certainly just going to end up doing a big smoky burnout which is not going to really help our case either.
04:20	So, let's head out and we'll see what we can achieve.
04:23	Alright, we've got our logger running here, we'll just get ourselves into third gear.
04:27	Want to try and do this from about 2000 RPM and let's see what we've got.
04:41	OK, it didn't quite get us all the way through to our red line there, but it's going to be enough data for us to have a look at and see what we can learn, so let's pull over and analyse it.
04:52	Alright, looking at our data here and it's honestly not the best piece of data together.
04:57	Third gear as it turns out wasn't quite high enough because we can see we ended up with some wheel spin and traction control intervention there.
05:06	And as mentioned, only got through to about 6000 RPM.
05:09	However, you can extrapolate this into what a proper run looks like of course and the process of analysing it and deciding what to do is no different.
05:18	We've got a little bit of knock retard occurring right here, but again one individual event there, it's not repeated, the knock hasn't come back.
05:27	So, on the basis of seeing one single knock event in a log like this, I'm not going to make any changes to our calibration.
05:34	Let's have a look at our closed loop and just make sure that everything was tracking where it should.
05:38	We can see our air fuel ratio jumping around a little bit, but yeah it's in the 11.4 vicinity at the end of that run.
05:45	Our total trim sitting, where's it, got a little spike here down to minus seven but that's momentary there.
05:52	The rest of it is looking really really good there.
05:55	So, at this point, no work to do with either our ignition timing or our mass airflow sensor calibration, everything essentially we saw on the dyno is stacking up under real world conditions, so at this point our tune is complete.
06:09	If you've got any questions on this worked example, please ask those in the forum and I'll be happy to answer them there.