Skoda Rally Blog

Now, I’m well aware that last time I posted on here, I said I’d be doing the mapping of the car over the following weekend (i.e. about 10 days ago).  I did intend to stick to that, but given that we weren’t entering Rally GB there was no real time pressure on doing it. Saturday’s weather was great, so instead of spending the day playing with the car, I went to Peppa Pig World with Tammie, Mabel and Eddie, and a great time was had.

However, that didn’t leave me with a car that ran well.  It now had oil pressure, and sounded OK, but was certainly not in running form, engine-wise, as the change of components (bottom end, particularly the camshaft, and exhaust manifold) meant that the old map would be miles off; it ran well enough to test the oil pressure, but not well enough to be driveable.  So the task was to sort that out, and that meant getting all the mapping gear ready.  The old laptop I used to use was replaced by a new one which came with “Project X” (to be revealed, soon enough!), a Panasonic Toughbook, which is really heavy and heavy duty.  I’d been using it for a while (for no reason, really), and it was fine.  But yesterday when I went to start using it, it was as dead as a dodo.  No charge in the battery, despite me putting it on the night before.  So I spent most of yesterday messing about with computers; unfortunately the DTA software for programming the ECU is complete rubbish – it looks like it was written for Windows 3.0, and is really terrible in terms of user-friendliness.  In addition, it’s terribly picky about the serial port it will use to communicate with the ECU, and no USB-Serial adapter I’ve tried with it works (even the one they recommend!), if you’re using a new operating system (i.e. Windows 7, etc).  So I was S.O.L.  I spent some time researching the laptop issue and finally fixed it with a battery drain utility.

So, this morning I thought I’d try getting it done.  First up was to make the car a bit more driveable – it had a couple of flat spots where it just wouldn’t run well at all, and they were dangerous, so first job was to manually patch them up, which involved getting my Mum involved, and she braved the stuttering beast for an hour or so while I got it a bit better behaved (she was noting where the flat spots were, then I pulled over and made changes).  Now it was at least capable of pulling away without getting me crashed into, it was time to do some proper mapping.  Now, I’ve covered this before, so I won’t go into too much detail, but it involves logging the engine speed, throttle opening and air/fuel mixture, then using some maths to look at the current map that was being used and calculating the new fuel requirements based on what has just been logged.  This would be simple if the DTA software was nice and the files it saved were documented, but it’s not, so it takes some jiggery pokery, and this time I finally decided to make a note of what I do so I don’t have to work it out from scratch in the future… (Project X has DTA as well…).  There were a few things to sort out to get this all set up (the power extension cable was broken, and I needed to get a new throttle pot), but after lunch I did a few runs, and improved the mix no end – it was running really rich in some places, really lean in others, and once it was more like the required mix then it ran well (when it was running rich it wasn’t happy at all – it felt pretty gutless).  It needs plenty of revs to make power, but then I guess that’s to be expected with a works cam – they revved to 8000rpm, after all.  And that’s not going to happen with my engine as it has standard rods in there!  However, after 5 mapping runs and revised maps it’s running pretty well; not much going on below 3k, but at 4 it takes off and at 6 it really gets going.  With the gearbox I have that’s no problem as changing from max revs still drops it back into the power.

Tomorrow I have a few things to sort out, mostly knocks and rattles, but it’s all looking spot on.  If only we were doing Rally GB.  However, it’s looking good for the Tempest!