In my search for brakes that would keep me happy during an endurance race, I had a pretty brutal talk with a man named Ken that owns KNSBrakes, a supplier of race-grade braking solutions. I originally just emailed him to get a recommendation on front calipers, but he told me to call him because it was too much to email.
Fine.
So I called and listened to him tell me what a terrible idea racing a WRX was.
For 30 minutes.
I think he signed off by saying if I owned a Subaru shop, had a mountain of cash to light on fire, and wanted to get internet famous, then go ahead. Or drive it backwards and call it a 911.
He told me that everyone pretty much gave up on the platform 5 years ago because it’s an economy car with a moderately sweet drivetrain. Fun street car. Underbuilt everything track car.
For whatever reason the news hit me pretty hard so I decided to set the project aside for a bit while I focused on the Datsun. I actually just wanted to sell the car I was so frustrated.
Fortunately, my friends talked me off the ledge. It’s a fun $1,500 car; just relax and enjoy it. Yay friends.
So, in the meantime, I’ve only done a few things on the car; I got some ECU stuff finally resolved, along with some interior bits and check engine codes.
Anyhow, here’s a bit of a catch-up to where the car is now.
Here's where we left off, with the wideband gauge floating around the center console.
The boost gauge was acting like the sensor was bad, so (as previously mentioned) I got a $17 gauge off eBay that used a sensor I believe would work with my gauge.
Behold, the "Universal Sport Meter: Performance When Power".
Before getting too far down the road, I wanted to check that it worked at all, so I pulled out the bench testing setup.
It seemed to work, yay.
The old sensor was disassembled to compare to the new one. Conclusion: Not The Same. Here's what the inside of the new sensor looks like:
I swapped it into the car and behold, boost readings. Woot!
Next was to tackle the wideband / EGT gauge swap. Or more accurately, remove the dead EGT gauge and put the wideband in its place. But first, RYEPhil told me to switch the AFR to Lambda because [something about meaningless AFR].
So I did. The AEM gauge needs disassembled to flip the faceplate, but it was very simple and a pretty cool feature, I think.
Look how sophisticated I am now. Pass le Grey Poupon, plz.
With everything out of the center stack, and the gauges on a single connector, it was very simple to swap in the wideband. It even worked!
But the cover doesn't fit nicely over the wideband gauge because of the much-larger bezel.
I've gotten a bit closer to fitting with the dremel since this photo, but it's not quite there. Small matter, but I'm very glad to have these gauges to monitor.
A little while ago I removed the charcoal cannister and all the solenoids that died in the flood from the back of the car. Because this is going to be a track car, I'm not replacing all that stuff, but there's a large open breather tube that I wanted to put a filter on to prevent any junk from going the wrong way.
These little filters are surprisingly expensive. This one was like $23. I really did search for a cheaper option, but failed.
I pushed it in place and secured with a hose clamp.
So that's solved for now.
Nik and I made a huge effort at the end of last year and the beginning of this year to get the shop cleaned and organized, but these are never 1-shot deals. The first pass resulted in amazing progress, but some stuff didn't have a home yet and we gradually got some piles regenerating. We decided to take a day to address some mess. I don't have a bunch of photos from it, but it was good. I do have this photo of the couple hours we spent organizing hardware, labeling and sorting.
At one point, I even washed the car. It is an odd looking thing.
Since I now have boost and wideband, I can get a much better idea of how the car is running, so I took it out for a quick spin with the eBay "stock / locked" ECU.
I saw 17-ish psi and lambda 0.68 (meaningless AFR ~=10). That's not stock. Stock is like 12-13psi and not that fat.
So this ECU was definitely "touched" at some point. I got back in contact with the original seller and he apologized and begrudgingly agreed to a refund. Great, I had a different stock ECU on the way, so all was well.
Until it showed up. Totally wrong ECU, it did not match the description or the photos from the listing. Ughhhhhhh. Feel free to skip the rest of this ranty paragraph. <rant> I contacted the seller who proceeded to disagree with me which ECU I was holding in my hands. After multiple back and forths, and him finally checking the photos I sent him, he realized, "oh, sorry, sent the wrong one." Ok fine, send me the right one with a return label enclosed and I'll send the wrong one back. Ok fine, so I wait a week. Nothing. Hellooo? He says he hasn't received the wrong one back. We didn't agree on that. Oh ya, well, go through the eBay return process, return the wrong one then he'll send it. Fine. I start the eBay process for the return, eBay tells me to wait up a week to get a shipping return label. A week goes by, nothing. Helloooo? Oh, he's waiting for me to start the return process. No, I did that. I have to send him screen captures to prove it. He decides to check his account. Oh, it's waiting on him to click "OK". So he clicks "OK" and I get a shipping label. Finally. I ship it back, he ships me the right one, and finally after 3 months I have a stock ECU. </rant>
So I took the stock/locked ECU out. Gratuitous photo because I like it.
Back to no ECU.
And here's the latest "stock" ECU that has some strange standoffs on it to show that someone has done something to this ECU at some point. Great.
I'll try it anyway.
Lo and behold, all seems well. I ran it for a minute, and sure enough the evap codes came on, relating to the charcoal cannister delete.
I got out the Tactrix Cable (again) and attempted to connect to the ECU and download the image.
Success!
Although it's a bit intimidating to have that much control over the car now. RomRaider, the software used to make changes to the ECU image, is pretty straightforward, so far at least. I was able to just "disable" the DTC codes relating to the evap system, then re-flash the image back onto the ECU. Now the ECU shouldn't be even looking for those codes, so no check engine light.
My next step was to try Ye Olde Tyme COBB V1 tuner.
Well I'll be, it works now too. It was the locked ECU causing these problems all along.
At this point, I actually downloaded another image of the ECU with the COBB Stg 2 93oct tune onboard. I haven't looked too deeply into it, but here's an image comparing the two BOOST tables. Stock on the left, COBB on the right. Sorry for the horrible image quality, these are screen captures via Bootcamp on a Mac, so the resolutions are all pretty unhappy.
For those that can't quite make out the fuzzy numbers, the stock 100% throttle is 12 - 13 psi, and the COBB is 15 - 17 psi. A healthy bump.
The target fuel ratio table shows the COBB tune is calling for 0.68 (~10 AFR in meaningless terms), which is quite rich. I'm told this adds a lot of safety factor and keeps the catalytic converters alive. If you get them too hot (like a 0.8 - 0.9 ratio would do), they'll melt and die. Additionally, peak engine torque drops less than 5%, even when running this rich. The big negative is an increase in fuel consumption. And a bunch of soot out the exhaust when you go wide open, which apparently is a dead giveaway of a mediocre tune. Once I have some better data logging, I'm going to try to bump it to 17psi across the whole 100% range, then target lambda at 0.75. I'll report back here if/when that happens.
Anyhow, I used the old camera-as-datalogger trick to film the gauges for a short test drive. I was able to get one full 2nd gear pull (I'm not brave enough to do a 3rd gear pull on the busy roads around town), with a dip into 3rd. The gauges seem to confirm the ECU tables I pulled. Here's a gif of that.
And here's a youtube link if you want to hear it:
YOUTUBE VIDEO OF SAABMARINE PULL
With no check engine lights and the car running pretty nicely, I'm at a bit of a loss what to do with it next. It definitely needs new brakes, one way or the other, so I'm still searching for that answer...
Thanks for reading!
damen
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