Throwback - ECU remapping

This is a throwback post because it happened all the way back in July this year lol.

Without boring you with the details, a series of events landed me at the door step of JC Racing, a well known aftermarket tuner in Sunway. They offer remap services for many cars which includes my Ford Fiesta 1.6l NA. This was a bit surprising because they are more well known as a Honda tuner.

For the non-car people reading this, a re-map tunes your car's ECU (Engine Control Unit) by changing the way it responds to input. Why re-map? because stock factory ECU are tuned for many export markets, which may have wildly different climate and fuel quality. This means that they are reliable in many conditions, but is not necessarily operating at it's most efficient. A re-map addresses this shortcoming by tuning the ECU to operate with better efficiency specifically for local operating conditions. 

If you like to modify cars, a re-map can also tune the ECU to take better advantage of your performance modifications.

Depending on the car model, a re-map can be as simply as plugging a laptop to the car's OBD2 port and uploading the map, or requiring a more physical approach which involves removing the ECU from the car to unlock it's access manually. The Fiesta was the latter.

Once the ECU was unlocked, it was re-installed into the car, and the car is placed on a dyno machine with a laptop plugged in the OBD2 port.

The shop's owner personally tunes every car that comes through that dyno, so mine was no different. After a few dyno runs before re-mapping and another few after re-mapping, it was done. The end result was less than remarkable - with about 10% gains in horsepower and a little more in torque, but that was expected for a naturally aspirated engine that has zero mods(Notice I never reported the actual wheel horsepower, because it is too puny to mention T_T). For a turbocharged car, a re-map would be way more worth it because the gains would be quite drastic - In fact it would be the cheapest and most reliable way to gain horsepower.

But the best improvement I got was in terms of driveability - better torque response across low to mid range RPMs. This means better response in town driving and more confidence in overtaking trucks on the highway.

Would I have done it had I known the gains to be so little? Hmm...probably not. But I don't regret it either. In fact if I do get a turbocharged car someday, the first mod I'll do will be to re-map the heck out of it.