Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 10: Confirming the Tune on the Road/Track

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Step 10: Confirming the Tune on the Road/Track

16.22

00:00	Alright, we've got our car off the dyno and out on the road and we're going to check and just make sure everything that we saw on the dyno still checks out under real world conditions and as we've discussed in the body of the course, it's quite common to see some small differences between the air fuel ratio as we see on the dyno for example and what we actually see under real world conditions due to air flows and temperatures that are very difficult, if not impossible to properly replicate on the dyno.
00:26	Likewise with engines that are quite knock sensitive, we may find that while we have no, knock on the dyno, we may get some knock occurring under real world conditions so again that's something we want to check for.
00:38	We're going to do this in two parts, first of all I'm going to have a look at our cruise part throttle areas of the map and essentially just make sure that everything there still checks out and while I'm doing this, I'm going to be gathering data into our learn table while I drive to our racetrack which is around about 40 minutes away.
00:56	And this means I'm going to be able to gather quite a lot of data into that learn table, we'll analyse that once we get to the track and see what changes if any need to be made.
01:04	Then we'll head out onto the track and we'll check our wide open throttle acceleration under those conditions on the track where it's nice and safe and again we'll be logging all of this, so that we can analyse it in the safety and comfort of the pits.
01:17	Let's just jump into our tuning software for a moment though and what I'm going to do before I get started here is just go back online and we will make a quick change here to our learn table, we'll just clear this learn table, so that we are starting from a fresh slate here, so that's cleared now, we've got our laptop over on the passenger seat and let's head out for a drive.
01:42	Before we do this as well, it is worth just making sure that the car is up to operating temperature, so that we're not learning while the car is warming up.
01:52	And obviously we want to just be a little bit mindful of the way we drive the car.
01:55	I want to be reasonably smooth with my throttle inputs, so that we're not bringing in undue acceleration or tip in enrichment, things like that.
02:04	And we want to basically cover as much of the learn table as we can.
02:09	So, this is as much as we can, but we're really wanting to concentrate of course on the cruise, part throttle and transition areas of the map as we sort of transition up into load.
02:21	Basically, the areas that the car is going to spend the majority of its time actually utilising when we're out on the road, given particularly this is a road car, not a race car, it's going to probably spend somewhere in the region of about 75-95% of its time either at idle or at part throttle cruise, so these are the areas that are really critical to make sure we've got dialled in.
02:42	We can also use a little bit of left foot braking to allow us to apply a little bit more load than we otherwise would be able to and access even more parts of the map.
02:53	So, from here we're just going to head to the track, we'll keep the data logging running while the learning operating and when we get to the track we'll stop and have a look at that data and see as I said what changes if any need to be made.
03:07	Just worth mentioning while we are driving as well, we want to just be mindful of any hesitations or stumbles, basically anything where the car isn't nice and smooth and driving as we'd expect and it's always worth, if something like that is occurring, just taking a note of what RPM and throttle position or load range that's occurring in and that'll allow us to reference that back to the fuel and ignition tables and see whereabouts we were when that was occurring.
03:36	We've got a helper as well which can be useful sitting in the passenger seat.
03:40	They can hold the laptop in, obviously take a much more specific note of where any problems are occurring.
03:46	That allows us to really quickly zero in on those areas and figure out what changes need to be made.
03:52	So, we'll fast forward now and come back when we're at the track and see what needs to be done.
03:57	Alright, we've made it to the racetrack here and we've done obviously a bunch of driving now, as I mentioned about 40 minutes to get to the track, so a good chance to really put it through its paces.
04:06	What I noticed is that the car drives beautifully, smoothly, really nothing that would make you think that it's anything other than a stock car other than the fact obviously it feels a little bit more powerful, so everything checks out there.
04:19	Let's have a look in our learn table now and we'll see our learned values and while they're a little bit larger than what we saw when we were on the dyno, we can see in the main areas here, we're sort of seeing values in the region of 1-2%, so nothing untoward there.
04:34	What we can see though which is not uncommon is down in these lower load areas, down at sort of 14, 18 kPa, we're seeing minus 3, almost minus 4 as well.
04:46	Now, that's not unexpected because we can't actually get down that low in the load on the dyno.
04:51	If we drop the throttle down to try and get into that load, we don't make enough torque to keep the dyno actually spinning, so that's why we can't get there, so it's totally acceptable, understandable why we would see values like this.
05:03	So, what we're going to do here is apply some changes to our fuel table on the basis of this and we can just again, like we were doing on the dyno, we're just going to extrapolate what we're seeing down a little bit lower, so let's take our values here, we'll take this to minus 3, don't expect that we're really getting down quite this far, particularly down here, that would just be the extrapolation of the learn, so what I'm going to do is let's take this to minus 2 and what we'll do is copy this out, bring it down here and we will offset that and multiply it by 0.5, so just reducing the power of that change and then we'll just use our column fill here to basically extrapolate that through.
05:51	Likewise we can take our values here, again not really too critical here, I am being fussy but we can make these changes, so no reason not to and again we'll just use our column fill to basically extrapolate those changes out.
06:10	Now, I'm not going to make any changes out here, sort of extrapolated to the right at this stage.
06:15	This is of course an iterative process, we're just going to show one round of these changes here, but of course you can gather as much data as you want for as long as you want and make sure, that you're really comfortable with this.
06:25	Again with the values that we've got in here, realistically I'd be more than happy to just disable the learn table at this point and leave that closed loop to pick up the pieces, but again we can be a little bit more particular, so we will.
06:41	What I'll do, before we copy these into our fuel table though, we'll Ctrl A to highlight the whole table, use our offset here and what we'll do is multiply by 0.5, we'll just basically make the effect of change a little bit smaller there and then we can apply that to our base and we will smooth, we'll come back and have a look at our fuel table, our fuel graph.
07:02	Again we've still got a nice smooth shape to that graph, so I'm quite happy with that.
07:07	So, again as I've mentioned, we might end up taking a couple of cracks at this on the road but again I'm already really really happy with the results we've got here.
07:15	What I'm going to do now, and as I mentioned this is personal preference, but I personally like to turn that learn table off once I know that I'm really close.
07:25	So, we'll come down to our closed loop learn parameters and we will disable our learn.
07:30	OK, so we'll just go back online here and send those changes back through to the ECU.
07:36	Now, we're going to head out on the track and we'll perform a wide open throttle acceleration test, essentially replicating our third gear pull that we were doing on the dyno and of course here we are going to be using our data logging.
07:49	As usual what we want to do is make sure before we do this pull that we have got rid of any heat soak, so we've got really realistic operating conditions, we're going to log that and we'll head back into the pits and then analyse our data and see what changes, if any, are necessary.
08:06	Because I've now disabled the learn as well, we won't be having to consider both the learn and the closed loop together, we will only have the closed loop functionality to offset our fuel table.
08:18	So, let's get ourselves out on track and we will gather some data.
08:23	Alright, so we're coming up to the section that I'm going to use for this acceleration test.
08:27	So, what we'll do is we will just get our data logger recording and I've just manually pulled the car into third gear here, it'll come through our little hairpin corner and we'll just go to full throttle and accelerate hopefully all the way through to our 6200 RPM max limit.
08:45	So, let's see how that all goes.
08:48	Alright, we'll go to full throttle now.
09:04	Alright, so we actually ended up with the transmission picking back down into second gear, so not really a true test, we went through to the top of second gear and then I allowed the shift to occur and we went to the top of third as well.
09:18	So, we're going to have some data, let's head back to the pits and analyse that and see what we've got.
09:23	OK, so we've got our data log open here and we can see this is where we kicked back down into second gear, so a little unfortunate there, but let's have a look at this anyway.
09:33	You can see at that point, 4500 RPM, we've got a 0% closed loop trim here.
09:38	Let's get rid of some of this other data that we don't need, it's OK.
09:42	And we can see here though, we do pick up to about a positive 2% trim and that's around 5100 to 5500, yeah not too bad, I mean within plus or minus 1% or 2%, it's probably about as good as we can really expect.
09:57	We can see that that's held, we've got 2%, I should say, around 5000 RPM and we come back to, we've got minus 1% there, 2% here.
10:08	OK, so if I'm going to have a trim as well, I would prefer it to be a negative trim, meaning that we're pulling fuel out, so we're naturally just a little bit rich.
10:16	So, for that reason, I wouldn't necessarily make any changes here where we've got this minus 1% trim and again we're really really close to our target anyway, so let's have a look though, 4700 to 5200, again we've got sort of a 1% to 2% trim in here, so let's just set up our split panes, so we've got both the overlay, the datalog and our map open at the same time.
10:40	Alright, so we've got our overlay open and active now, so again we'll just have a look here, we wanted to add 1% from around about this point here, 4800 RPM, so let's put our cursor, our little cursor on that point, we want to add that through to around about this point here, so we're about 5800 RPM, so let's just do exactly that.
11:07	We'll bring that down a little bit below where we were and we will use the offset and multiply that by 1.01, again we'll just creep up on this.
11:18	Looking at this again, so same point here, 2% so we've put in a little bit less than what it's asked for, then at the top of the run here, we're pulling in minus 1%, not too worried about that, but here from 6000 RPM and above, we're pulling out 2% so, let's just make that change here.
11:38	And we'll actually make this change all the way down as well which I should have done with our last change, offset, multiply by 0.99, again we're just taking 1% out here instead, of the full 2, we'll creep up on this and again because I didn't extrapolate that change down, I will do now.
11:56	So offset, multiply it by 1.01.
12:01	OK, so we've got our first round of changes done, we'll just deactivate or remove our overlay there, we'll go back live with our ECU and send that change through and let's head back out on track and we'll get another lot of data, this time we'll hopefully be able to try and keep the car locked in third gear, so it won't shift down.
12:20	Alright, we're just coming up to the section of straight that we want to use here, so we'll just get our datalogger started again.
12:28	I'll get round the corner here and we can go again to full throttle and this time hopefully, we won't end up kicking down a gear.
12:52	OK, better result that time, we've got a full pull through the gear, right the way from about 2000 RPM to 6200, let's head back to the pits and have a look at our datalog.
13:00	Alright, we've got our datalog open here and straight away we can see, definitely did a much better job this time, we're 2000 RPM through to 6250 RPM.
13:11	Now, looking at our closed loop here, we can see that right at the start we've got some positive trim in here.
13:18	Again as I mentioned on the dyno, this is just tip in tuning that needs to be done or accelerate enrichment tuning, so we can pretty much ignore that.
13:26	Looking at the rest of it, closed loop sitting zero, got a little bit of movement, maybe minus one here, but this is all looking really really good.
13:35	Back to zero, positive one there.
13:39	Looks like we do still have potentially a little bit of work to do.
13:42	So, 5700 RPM which is actually an area that I added fuel, obviously went a little too far there, minus two, we've got that up to about 6000 RPM.
13:55	So, 5800 RPM through to 6000 RPM, we might want to make a small adjustment here.
14:03	So, I'll take that from 5700 RPM and we'll go through to 6100 and we can offset that and we'll multiply there by 0.99, so just take another percent out of there.
14:20	However, we're now starting to really chase our tails with very very small iterative improvements and this is just a rinse and repeat until we've got results that we're happy with.
14:31	Remembering we will always see a little bit of variation from one pull to the next.
14:36	So, when I'm seeing errors in the range of about 1%, it's probably about as close as we can get, we're never really going to get a perfect result with just a zero trim everywhere and that is of course, is why we have our closed loop available in the first place.
14:51	Now, before we finish off this, I will just come back to our system parameters and back to our closed loop in learning and we've already discussed the fact that the amount of authority that this has, the closed loop system has from default is way way more than it really needs so, what we're going to do is just make some sensible adjustments to this and what we'll do is come down to 79 kPa and what we're going to do is set that to plus or minus 5%.
15:19	The rest of the map I'm going to set to plus or minus 10, then we're just going to come back into the idle areas here and we will set that to plus or minus 15, again as I've already mentioned, quite often we're just going to have a little bit of heat soak that will affect us at idle more than anywhere else, so this is a more sensible table, doesn't give excessive authority and if something does go wrong with the wideband sensor that isn't picked up as a diagnostic error, then we know that we're not going to end up with crazy amounts of trim creeping in that will stop the car from even running or potentially damage it.
15:56	So, there we go, we've got to the end of our worked example, we've got our Holley Terminator properly tuned, we've got good control of our fuel, we've got good control of our ignition, we've got no knock and our closed loop trims are all under control.
16:08	So, this brings us to the end of our worked example.
16:11	As usual if you do have further questions on this particular worked example, feel free to ask those in the forum and I'll be happy to help out.