Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Minist)

Posts specific to the 2.5 litre NA engine

Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Minist)

Postby west_minist » Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:21 am

If you are interesting in tuning the 2.5i, please let me know.

I am seeing area's for improvements, but there may not be such as the likes for the 3.0/3.6R, since those models have AVCS to help.

I have a potential customer with a 2007 model that may come into tuning.

Again, if you are interested, please let me know.

You will need the Tactrix cable and a laptop and a little time.

In the 2.5i tuning, here are the critical maps that are supported for tuning:- Fuel, Ignition, DBW and a few other semi critical maps. Because every car is custom tuned, each car peak performance is match. If you are looking for a based map, I can do that, but custom tuning is better for stable performance.
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Stock Performance

Postby west_minist » Sat Aug 27, 2011 3:56 pm

http://www.xtremeracingtuning.com/forum ... f=40&t=400

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Stock Criticals

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Stock 3rd Gear Dyno-rpm IAT=19C

Customer feedback on the first rom release: v0a
The car is definitely pulling better giving me a lack of "lag" on the throttle, being more responsive in general, and there it feels as though there is virtually no effort in climbing hills. I had to remind myself about the difference by quickly flashing back the original ROM to compare.

While the car is overall much more driveable with much smoother gear changes, I'm having a little trouble doing slow stop-start driving in traffic in 1st gear without using copious amounts of clutch to compensate for me accidentally over-revving the car as I'm used to putting more throttle in with the original ROM. Over the day of testing, however, I managed to handle this a lot better so I know there will be a period of personal adjustment as we go through each version as I found myself almost stalling the car late in the day when I went back to the original ROM to compare against.
Last edited by west_minist on Thu Sep 01, 2011 9:07 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby HyRax » Mon Aug 29, 2011 11:02 am

The importance of consistency!

As you can see, all my runs are all over the shop. I've been doing my runs on a highway which means a rolling start and never an exact starting point due to making sure no other traffic is around me.

You really do need to find a quiet, flat static road that you can start from the exact same point every time so that the road incline and direction never changes halfway through your run.

Anyway, while I continue to search for that quiet, safe road that doesn't require me to travel an hour to get out to, Edward has done well to make do with what I've given him and I've gone through three ROM's already. Edward is so good, that even before I had a chance to apply v0 to my car, he'd already given me v0a! I am now up to v1 and continuing testing.

With the v0a ROM already, I'm finding the car has much greater driveability - the car feels "lighter" to drive. When comparing against the original ROM, the throttle felt extremely laggy on the original and light and feathery on the v0a ROM. It is just a starting point, but it's very easy to over-rev the engine in start-stop traffic and I've had to adjust my foot application as a result. Edward's v1 ROM seems to have addressed this by reducing the "friskiness" of the throttle from standstill a bit, but I'll probably get Edward to tweak it up a little more again to make it feel a little more in line with the higher revs as I'm now getting used to it and prefer it now.

Where the car could bog down easily from standstill if you didn't apply enough throttle before releasing the clutch, the car now easily and effortlessly moves away from standstill. Where the was a small lurch in gear changes, the majority of up changes under v0a are smooth as silk under normal or hard acceleration.

Driving up a hill is easier as well - where you might have applied a certain percentage of throttle to climb before, it feels as though you only have to apply half that throttle and you are achieving the same power, if not more power, to climb instead. The engine does not appear to be revving any harder for the task.

From a noise perspective, the engine sounds gruntier and I even flashed back to the stock ROM to compare - you can instantly feel the large differences already despite being so early in the tune. Kudos to Edward for that.

The v1 ROM is designed to introduce tweaks to power/torque into the tuning regime and I'll be testing that properly tonight. So far the drive this morning on v1 felt really good in back streets, but due to overall traffic volume I haven't really been able to put my foot down. The car should feel faster than before on this ROM.

Edward has proven to be great to work with - he's always available on IM or email and in fact he's been badgering me for new logs a lot - I almost feel I'm letting him down with not being able to get the data soon enough! ;) I entered into tuning with XRT with the aim of increasing driveability of the car and increase fuel efficiency, but I am confident that I will see some power/torque bonuses by the end of it as well. I don't expect improvement percentages to be as great as you would have on a 3.0 or GT, but I still think this is money very well spent. I'm learning a lot about the fine art of tuning, and Edward is more than happy to answer any questions I have, and encourages me to ask them as well.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby dmh87 » Mon Aug 29, 2011 10:45 pm

Thanks for sharing your feedback, sounds very interesting.

Very keen on giving this a go too
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby HyRax » Tue Aug 30, 2011 12:46 am

v1 ROM update

Tonight I did some formal lead-foot tests of the v1 ROM.

Hoooo-ly crap...! The car is on fire! Who'd have thought there was so much untapped power in the 2.5i?? With NO MODS???

The car actively pulls and powers on and on and on, all the way to redline with only a slight softening of puff as you pass 5,000rpm. Under 4,000rpm, the car was still perky from the v0a ROM, but v1 really took this to the next level above 4000rpm with the tweaks in timing and fuel.

I finally found myself a good, safe road to do pulls on that wasn't a highway, so I re-did my stock and v0a pulls to maintain consistency between each ROM release. Again, when I went back to the stock ROM after being tantalised with v1, it felt downright horrible. It was so laggy I felt as though I was driving an untuned WRX with a monster aftermarket turbo. I couldn't believe just how much extra throttle I was putting in to compensate for the lag under the stock ROM - all without realising!

While the car felt awesome, there was some pinging which was the result of Edward exploring the upper limits of changes. The next ROM, v2, will go back to the more conservative v0a timing and introduce some changes to the bottom end as Edward is not happy with what he saw there in my v1 pulls tonight from a fuel perspective.

And true to form, Edward prepped v2 very quickly - ready to rock in my InBox within minutes of posting him the new logs! Will flash and run new logs tomorrow.
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v1 response

Postby west_minist » Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:51 am

In V0a, the loads pulls were 100% clean. In v1, I added 1 degree. I saw issues popping up sometimes. So I remove and revert back to v0a timing in clean load areas. We will see how v2 go. This car is 100% stock. An exhaust system would most probably bring this car a little more life. Its an eco engine. Good note is, stock inj are max on stock rom. So far we have some fuel savies. In all out, up to 5% more savings.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby west_minist » Tue Aug 30, 2011 3:20 am

Review logs, the problem is the gas. v0a was re-done and its pinging in high rpm loads. THe customer will revert to his old station.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby HyRax » Tue Aug 30, 2011 7:35 am

I'll be finding a new supplier of BP Ultimate - my last two tanks have been from the same petrol station. Will probably do some extra driving this week to burn this tank up sooner than later as I want to see if there really is a difference from another station. If there is, I'll be writing into BP to complain about the first station.

Thanks for your work on this, Edward.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby west_minist » Tue Aug 30, 2011 9:14 am

I thought you told me you filled from another station. Ok. No prob. Here in Barbados, gas is not consistent.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby HyRax » Tue Aug 30, 2011 9:25 am

No, the fuel was always from the same place. The only thing that changed was the road I was doing the dynos on. :)

Next tank will be from a larger BP station that should be a bit more reputable, and if that fails I'll consider switching to Caltex or Shell.
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v1

Postby west_minist » Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:24 pm

Ok. The dyno variance are so large between runs. Dyno'es are not needed. Once you are enjoying the car, all is good.

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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby HyRax » Tue Aug 30, 2011 6:59 pm

I don't understand why there is so much variance between runs... I made sure I was starting the same way each time. :?
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby west_minist » Tue Aug 30, 2011 7:10 pm

Ok. Like I said, the dynos are not need. Only used as reference and to show some of us what the power curve looks like on the 2.5i.
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby HyRax » Wed Aug 31, 2011 12:22 pm

v2 ROM update

This release saw a return to v0a timing but with some bottom end changes that Edward made, so I wasn't expecting the car to be as exciting as v1 was, but I was wrong. The car, while not quite as "brutal" feeling as v1 was, was still a lot of fun and it still felt like an "angry" car. I found second gear to be very deep and powerful and gear changes were still fairly smooth except for 1st to 2nd in hard driving acceleration only which seemed to lurch a little, but not by much. Normal driving acceleration in all gears felt smooth, however.

I found third gear to be very linear in its pull again like v1, and 1st gear also pulled off the line very nicely.

I found flat-footing in 1st gear to exhibit a small stop-start jump, but that was probably me applying too much throttle too early and not letting the clutch slip enough before the car could get physically moving properly.

Interestingly I found reverse gear going up into someone's driveway to do a three-point turn to be very nice! You never think about reverse until you are doing it up a hill, and I found it effortless to get up this incline to turn myself around.

One thing I found with second gear while doing some, er... evaluative hooning, was that when I deliberately changed at 5,000rpm, the car consistently revved up about another 500rpm which felt as though the car was still accelerating by itself - I could see this was the normal auto-rev that occurs in normal gear changes, but it gave me a momentary spook as I thought the car had decided to go off and do its own thing with a stuck throttle.

Overall am I finding the car to be very responsive with an apparent increase in torque in second gear. Acceleration is linear, particularly in third, and when the car is on song above 3,000rpm, that is when it feels the most meaty, so I found myself deliberately changing gears quite high to keep the next gear above 3,000.

Another interesting thing I observed was my fuel economy meter. Under the stock ROM, if I hooned around, the meter's estimated distance to empty very
quickly diminished - we're talking fill up with an estimated distance-to-empty of about 600kms very quickly dropping to 300kms within a few hours of lead-foot action. This time around, despite this current tank being hooned on a lot more than driven normally by a factor of about 3:1, the estimated distance-to-empty is remaining quite high for a change - currently reading 400kms with 130kms burned off on this tank already. Since I am deliberately trying to burn off this tank in a bid to refill it with quality BP Ultimate from another servo, it will be interesting to see what my final kilometre tally will be for this tank.

The idle rpm has been raised from the factory 750rpm up to 800rpm, and this has surprisingly helped moving from standstill more effectively than I imagined - getting off the line, especially if it's a deliberate slow start such as crawling in stop-start traffic, is easier than before.

The v3 ROM which Edward has posted me today will be a longer-term test. I'll be running it for a handful of days to see what learning the ECU will do in that time. As a challenge, Edward isn't telling me what has changed until I've run v3 for awhile, so I'll have to give him a seat-of-the-pants review over the next 24-96 hours! :D

I continue to be amazed at the noticeable differences between each ROM release. Edward truly is a master of his art. Careful and methodical, he really gets results!

Looking forward to flashing v3 tonight!
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Re: Tuning the 2.5i by Xtreme Racing Tuning (Tuner: West_Min

Postby west_minist » Wed Aug 31, 2011 12:41 pm

Thanks for your kind reply. I believe you may need to change oil soon or the spark plugs are slowly going. Either way, you one of my very first advid customer. None have never been so detail. But its good as the first 2.5i customer. Like I stated and always have to remind customers, I specialised in STI's and project cars. Its always interesting to NA performs.
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