Gridlock Mikey

Anyone in Nottingham had it done? Just about to book a slot to having it done on my MY00 UK. Over the years I have tried loads of things to keep me "interested" in the performance without spending a fortune. I had the car about 2 months and I changed the back box. New noise but not alot more shove to be fair. 1 month later the downpipe took a kicking. Loads more noise and yes I did notice a difference but it wasn't anywhere near what I expected. That's when I started learning to take some threads with a pinch of salt
I mentioned it on Scoobynet and the centre cat was blamed, so the next month, off that came. So where was this amazing spool up time and mid range torque. I entertained myself with the thought that at least the car sounded how i wanted it to and at the time it was still quite a rare thing to see on the roads.
A few months later, the OE panel filter came under attack, the ITG debate was raging strong as was the pro's and cons of removing your inner wing resonator.
I was advised to put an ITG in and remove the resonator (By a respected company ) I did it and guess what? Yep, loads more noise (Which was great by the way) but i beg to differ that it made ANY difference at all to the cars performance as far as ummph was concerned. (car ran fine for about 25,000 miles like that by the way)
So there I was, nearly £1k out of pocket (Yes exhausts used to cost alot more) and all I REALLY had was a car that was louder.
That taught me to listen to no-one remotely connected to selling stuff for my car about performance gains, I started listening to other drivers, not the money to burn herberts but folk who had spent their money and had nothing to loose by telling me it was a waste of money. Boy those conversations saved me a fortune
Then you start getting to learn about the engines and over the years I have learn't about Air Fuel Ratio's, Detonation (Not as scary as some will have you believe) MAF's, Induction Kits, Turbo's, FMIC's, Idle control Solenoids, Wastegates, Boost solenoids, ECU's, Exhaust effects, TMIC's, Airflow, fuel pumps etc etc etc The only thing i genuinley no NOTHING about is Suspension and that's only cos i've never needed to get involved in it.
I then did the unthinkable (in those days anyway ) I put a DAWES device on my car and WOW No wonder all the tuners were calling them dangerous and foolhardy.It made thier £500+ packages look stupid, indeed exposed them for the rip off some of them where. £30 got me a totally different car. Here was a device that gave me another 3 or 4 psi of boost over standard and the car felt like it flew. So much more than just changing the exhaust and filter. I didn't have a knock link or a bost gauge to start with and I loved the car. Just how I wanted it. I continued this for about 45-50,000 miles without a problem and I now figure that the girls getting a little bit older so a bit more care is required. Let's face it, it needs doing properly.
TEK 1 & 2 seem to be a waste of money, another throw back to yesteryear where people swore blind it was the best thing and you would gain 93.8% in power and then the TEK3 hit the shelves.
Touted as an acceptable ECU upgrade, not in the same league as the MoTECs and Links of this world but i'm not a rally or race driver so figured i'd not need to part with £1,500 & VAT for an ECU programme Especially after the Exhaust let down.
So who's had it done, can I get a go (You can have a blast in mine if you so desire and is it just hype or does it make a difference?

Sorry to go on and on, but i'm sure you see my point

Oh Anyone wanna buy a DAWES, £20 it's yours

STi wanna Subaru

iTrader: (1)

Thanks for that.... I needed that 5 minute nap

cw42

iTrader: (1)

business slow gridlock
I've had a tek 3 remap from BRD DEVELOPMENTS on now since last june. It cost me £550 in a group buy at the time, and was done by BOB RAWLE.
After some recent overboosting problems, caused mainly by the boost solenoid and my exhaust (decat, BPM 3" TWISTER), Bob kindly remapped it again.
The first thing you notice when driving a properly mapped car is how smooth it is. Secondly, as you say, we're not rally drivers, and I want all my power to be smack bang in the mid-range, which it is. Between 2900 and 5500 rpm, my car is in full swing. Its a standard my99 uk turbo, now producing a very safe 284bhp/296lbft torque.
It takes a while to get used to though, as when you are driving, you are always in a higher gear than before, so if you used to take a sharp corner in say 2nd gear, you can now take the same corner in 3rd, and still be in the power band to slingshot out the otherside.
I can't recommend a remap enough m8, just make sure the mapper is clear on what you want from it. All top end power, or nice drivable mid-range.
Unfortunatly, unless your coming over to Stockport in the near future, you can't have a go, but I'm sure there are people closer to you that will let you try before you buy

chris.

john banks

It won't make much difference over a Dawes in terms of outright performance - you are buying finesse, safety and elegance, all of which are not always appreciated if you haven't had problems. Throttle modulation may be improved if the ECU controls the boost, you might get a bit more torque out of it.

All in, I don't think you will like it given what you've said here and previously.

New_scooby_04

iTrader: (4)

That's gotta be worth the money for the safety aspects alone!! How much does a rebuild cost? Besides, lets face it, if a mapper can extract similar figures as on CW's car, you'll be looking at a car that should produce sub 5 second runs to 60, which is properly fast by any sensible road car standards. If that's not enough for you on a Scooby budget I'd respectfully suggest you're being ungrateful!!

Trem

iTrader: (3)

I had mine done at Power Engineering in November and it was kinda worth it.

It picked up quicker and felt smoother but now I'm a bit bored and am thinking of getting the boost upped from the 1.2 they set it at.

I live in Stoke and catch me on the right day and I may let you have a go.

Danny B

Had my MY00 mapped by Pat @ Scoobysport, totally transformed the car by adding 30bhp & 30lbft of torque.
Expensive for what it is, but very impressive.

scoobimax

Hi Gridlock.

Spoke briefly with you up at scoobyclinic. Pat's doing the mapping at the clinic now and there is a group buy on at the moment - not sure if you've seen it and prompted this but if you haven't and do go for it I'd take a gander and save some £'s.

Not had mine done (MY99) but would seriously consider it a) after I'd finished my mods and b) was planning on keeping the car long term.

But as I'm planning to change in about 18 months(ish) I want to save as much money as I can and stop spending on mods for mine (easier said than done, I can tell you).

Not much help am I? Sorry.

Max

scooby-si

still remember you putting one on my old wagon mikey

austen_wrx

Just had a TEK3 on my MY04 WRX by Pat. I'll try and describe how i feel my mods have improved the car:-

1. Backbox - not a great deal of difference, car seemed to rev more freely at top end though. Difference is more noticeable when putting the standard box back on afterwards
2. Decat up pipe, down pipe and centre - Definetly a good improvement, more grunt low down and car picks up quickier. When driven alongside a mate with standard exhaust (apart from backbox) in 3rd and 4th, my car would pull away slowly, about 1-1.5 car lenghts over 1/4 miles. Only downsides were that it was a little lumpy at tickover, especially when cold, and the CEL light came on(easily fixed)3
3. Removed resonator from inner wing and replaced with plain pipe (snorkleoctomy) - No performance difference, very little noise increase.
4. STI panel filter - no difference in performance or noise (mainly done in preperation for TEK3)
5. Tek3 by Pat - I was expectiing massive things from this, but initially (and i mean the same day) i was dissapointed as i didn't real feel i had gained anything from it. But that evening i sat down and started to think about how the car was driving, and trying to compare how it felt in comparision to before, i went to bed looking forward to driving it in the morning. Now after driving it for a few days i am a happy bunny , the car pulls stronger than ever from just below 3krpm all the way through to 6k. The boost doesn't drop off as before (standard and decatted) as the car goes past 4750rpm, and the whole car runs a lot smoother than when just decatted. The car in 3rd and 4th is so much quicker to drive, with no need to keep dropping down a gear to keep it in the power range, i'm not saying that i would be getting massively faster times (if timed ), but it is just a lot easier to drive as fast (if not faster), especially on unfamiliar roads.

There are a couple of reasons i think i felt a little dissapointed at first, firstly i was expecting a violent difference, i.e. big kick in the back when the boost came in, where as in fact you get a stronger and smoother pull, secondly, i was actually driving the car while it was being mapped, so you are getting the increase in performance gradually, so you are almost used to it by the time it is finished. I am sure that if i jumped in a standard car (which i am planning on doing this weekend, aswell as doing the 3rd and 4th gear tests with my mate again) i would real feel the difference. Its like most mods, you can notice the upgrades slightly, but when you down grade, you notice it a hell of a lot more.

Gridlock Mikey

Thanks for that Austen Just the type of feedback I was looking for Shame it was on a newer car but objective non the less.

Si, those were the days mate

John, just noticed, you have more posts than me Bet my posts have been more non sensical than yows

mark6

this has puzzled me a bit now???,i thought a tek3 over a standard impreza would make alot of differencce power wise??,if a standard 04 wrx is what? 225?? and the prodrive pack now puts it up to 261bhp is it?? and you have just de-catted the up pipe as well which prodrive don't,and the prodrive map is an off the shelf ecu map and your map is a tek3 custom map which has to be better than the prodrive one,then surely this adds up to a fair bit of extra power??if prodrive claim 261bhp the surely tek3 must be 261bhp+??

scoobyboy1

iTrader: (16)

When I had my Tek 3 done on a MY00 at TSL I changed the Turbo,Intercooler,Injectors etc then had a slow drive to Nottingham to get it mapped, it went from a 215bhp standard scoob to a 300+bhp beast and i certainly noticed the diffreance, and the drive home was not as slow as the drive up there was.

WRX_Rich

iTrader: (5)

when I first had my car mapped it was all at once and felt quick but the boost died at 5k revs

this did feel quicker than my current map which feels some what turbo less but i know its not, as you say its time behind the wheel and the "this car is going to chew up my license" feeling that the std car never gave

Gridlock - I still say the springs, anti roll bar/lift kit and powerstation geometry made my car feel quicker than the map if that gives you anything to go by.

I know what you mean about the posts where people seem to get blown away by the performance of a air filter and de cat

when I had my headers, downpipe, tek3 and filter fit it did give enough extra power to give that feel good factor but it lasted all of 2k miles then it just felt std all over again

if you want your scoob to feel stupidly fast buy a small run about -im now going to work in a 55bhp polo - the scoob now feels like a 400 bhp monster

austen_wrx

LOL, just done the same, i'm looking forward to the start of april when my lovely 12 year old 205 1.8 GRD is pootling me to work, and scoob blows me away at the weekends/evenings

austen_wrx

I'm not doubting it is sticking out 261bhp+, but what i', saying is that you will feel a difference, but a 40-50 bhp increase won't snap your neck off (as i was expecting). When i was ordering my most recent car (last august) i took a wrx ppp blobeye out on a test drive and wasn't overly impressed as it didn't feel any different to my decatted bugeye, and that was jumping straight from one car to another. Its hard to accuratly compare as it has been so long, but the TEK3 does seem better than my memories of the ppp. I also think the claimed ppp figures should be taken with a pinch of salt, yes ok some may make 261bhp, but i'm sure alot of them don't

MikeWood

Sorry chaps, I'm going to have to bite on this one......

Why???

Our maps have been developed to work on every car in all conceivable conditions as the ECU is capable of doing that. Undoubtedly it is possible to optimise the ECU on any car to work perfectly (if you really know what you are doing, which isn't a criticism of anyone's capabilities in ANY way) on the day you are mapping it, but what happens when you put different fuel in, or the weather changes, or you do some more miles and the engine frees up a bit more, or it's been mapped at sea level and you live up a hill, or it's 6 months later and it's 20 degrees hotter/colder every day, or you have it serviced and a new air filter is fitted, or it's 5 degrees when you drive to work and 15 degrees when you drive home??? There are many many many more variables involved than the tolerances between individual cars.

Where an individually mapped ECU may well be of benefit is if the spec of the engine is different in some way but again, the benefits are wholly down to the skill of whoever is using the software, not the fact that it's individually mapped. A 'Tek3' isn't a product that is quantifiable, it isn't anything really, it's just a misnomer applied to a remap of an ECU to a spec that is different to the std remaps available when you buy the software from EcuTeK. You could liken it to a hammer by saying 'I've bought a smack with a lump hammer'. We can all buy the same hammer from B&Q, the skill involved in using it is to know where to hit, how hard and how many times to achieve the result you are wanting. And you don't even get to keep the hammer afterwards....




Based on what exactly?? If you are basing this on rolling road figures, haven't we decided already that rolling roads are a notoriously variable measure of power output, particularly on cars that have many self-protection strategies built into the ECU? We tune our packages to work well on the road in as many conditions as possible, not necessarily to work on a dyno where the conditions may be far from controlled to how the car operates on the road.


To get into some specifics about the WRX, our PPP is basically tuned to the injector capacity. They aren't big enough to safely cope with more power than around 265ps safely with compromising EGT's. More boost would need more fuel which the injector cannot deliver. Reducing the desired afr so that the injectors are not trying to run well over 100% just pushes up the port temps which is not safe in the long term. We could fit bigger injectors and make some more changes to the exhaust but this would have a significant impact on the package price for a relatively small increase.

Regards

Mike

paul w

Erm interesting thread,

Can anyone who is'nt involved with the tek game comercially tell us if the remaps are just a boost raise,fuel cut raise and very slight tweaks to standard maps or are the maps totally changed as we could by all getting a bit carried away by paying loads for not a lot and following the sheep again.

I am talking about minor modded cars less than 300bhp not the big power boys.

Cheers

john banks

Well said Mike.

austen_wrx

I can't argue with that Mike

My comment about the claimed bhp isn't a dig, its just (as you state)
So obviously on every car you could get a different figure. Out of interest is the 265ps based on a development car or an average of a numbers of cars??

john banks

Paul, maps are totally changed. I used to map commercially, not now, nothing to hide. I routinely changed boost, fuelling, ignition and other parameters. Even the most basic "Tek1" (as it was previously known) had fuel and boost changes IIRC.

paul w

Thanks John,

I thought i would get an honest answer from you.

Peanuts

iTrader: (15)

if you want to see the same arguement in its infancey, head over to the mlr/evo land.
they are just getting TEK3 softare now, yet again the most oft asked question is "how much power will it give?".

I dont profess to know the ins and outs of engine mapping, I read dave Walkers book and have a grasp of the concept, but not the overall package.

What I have gleaned though, is that TEK3 is a tool to allow you to push the engine as far as the owner/mapper is willing, all within the confines of the mappers expertise.

I think some people need to look at the bigger picture, maybe a remap is more value for money when a bigger turbo/bigger injectors/free flowing exhaust and headers are fitted and the gains more noticeable, I myself went from 260 up to approx 330 bhp and consider my Apexi ECU/Andy.F map to have given very good VFM.

otherwise (in the case of say just a panel filter and decat) it might be more prudent to fit an EBC with FCD and carefully monitor the afr's/knock/egt's. The gains might be slightly more agricultural and you wont be able to shift the powerband about like a mapper can, but (for example) Harvey will sell you a hybrid version EBC for £140, say add £200 for second hand knocklink/lambdalink and EGT gauge and you are better of to the tune of at least £200, that pays for the next two (minor) services.

half the problem is spurious claims by some manufacturers that have since become gospel, and hence owners expect a given figure for a particular state of tune and being just 1 bhp under will cause uproar.
If a downpipe will give 25bhp, centre 10 and silencer 15, panel filter or cone another 10, how come std. cars with a full decat and filter dont make 280bhp? add headers to that (another 25bhp) and its over 300 bhp, wahay!!
only it isnt, is it?

in fact, most cars that have full decat and filter seem to do about 255/260 bhp tops.
what about the (unfortunate??! ) WR1 owner who was 10 bhp down on factory?
who would really notice 10bhp? but he, and the others around him at the time thought it was terrible and that his car would be left behind.
piffle, but I bet Mike had to agree to look at the car/map.

7 Foot

Have to say I totally agree.

I drive a MY00 with full de-cat, Green panel filter, John Banks 'Tek 2.5', Samco's and a Dawes set at 1.25 bar. Whilst I am pleased with how it performs power-wise, the modifications to its suspension and handling have always impressed me far more than any of the above.

I have Eibachs, Whiteline 22mm ARB, Whiteline droplinks, bumpsteer mod and Powerstation geometry (not all done at the same time) and the difference is massive.

If you really want the car to feel special again then get to Powerstation (or maybe TSL) and play with the handling of the car. If you are still running on the std shocks then it may well be time to replace those with something a little more interesting.

kart_man

Why not just bite the bullet and get 420bhp @ 1 bar with this....

http://www.subaru.me.uk/gtr

dowser

For cars running standard turbo, I map to the lowest common denominator (ie; worse case environment). It is completely different from the stock map, but I don't do "custom" mapping on standard cars to squeeze the best out of a stock TD04 - the most I've seen from going to the trouble was just over 5% increase from a safe base map suitable for all (healthy) cars and still leaving it sensible for all situations (see Mike's post for variables, but add the German autobahn's and 30 minutes at VMAX here in CH). Not worth my time, or the customers money. 260-270 hp is a sensible limit IMO.

If fitting different turbo, manifold or fuel systems then I customise by default. But I still play relatively safe. I have no interest in big bhp numbers; just in the how quick the car is point to point. This is more a function of the finesse and elegance that John mentions (IMVHO ), than big power numbers (unless the point-to-point is 400m long and straight ).

Richard

mark6

You have a point there mike and i have to agree with you about the different conditions the cars have to perform in.i didn't really look at it like,what i was getting at was that most cars that come off the production line are made to a tolerence,so as there is a tolerance some cars vary from others.as your map is identical in every car some will perform different from others,some better,some worse and some the same.

The tek3 is custom to your car,they plug in the hardware,load the software and bring out the best,as you say its all at the end of the day down to the programmer,if m1crosoft where to program it i could understand,but i thought these popular mappers that everyone on here praises like gods where the pro's who know how to get the most out of this software and the cars they are modifiying and thats why the price is so high for a couple of hours programming and the licence,i was under the impression that there will be other ecutek programmers who can improve your cars as well but not to the standards of these guys mentioned on here.

you do have a point but i still think custom if done properly is surely better than mass production.

Peanuts

iTrader: (15)

i still think custom if done properly is surely better than mass production.

I have to agree, although that would suggest that some cars are not too far away from these tolerances and so perform better out the box, therefore, custom wont provide the same level of gains.

Wobbly

Personally I would rather keep my warranty intact.....

Gridlock Mikey

Oh OK then