- Turbo Boost page 1 of 6
This Lotus Carlton was the first one I'd ever driven, I've been a passenger a few times, but never driven one until now. Knowing that it had been chipped the first job was to call upon club members James Waddington and Malcolm Robb for major assistance. I wanted to return the ecu to std format, but was not as simple as just changing the chip. James lent me a ecu, whilst Malcolm actually did the hands on work to find out exactly what had been done to my ecu by the chipper and return it to standard. Until this work was completed I did'nt want to drive the car hard for fear of something going wrong. There are good reasons for not chipping these cars, read Malcolm's webpage here for an excellent insight..........all will become clear.
My LC had been fitted with a superchip and aftermarket boost solenoid, and also a shift light and extra boost control unit, all was removed.
With ecu at standard condition I felt I could now explore the potential of the car, well, I have to say I was disappointed, in some respect this may be due to an over expectation and that also owning a Senator fitted with a 4.0L Irmscher engine made the LC feel not as powerful as I would have liked.
There was one pressing job I wanted to get done before the next summer, so I spent summer of 2002 just getting used to the car and sorting a few minor jobs.
Spring 2003 was to be the time I tackled the timing chain swap, with this out of the way I could be sure and confident at least these components were not going to let me down.
After a few trips out following some other LC owners I was convinced the engine was way down on power, I booked into SAS performance to have power check run. This confirmed my fears, max power was 336bhp...standard should be 377bhp.
Quite obvious that boost is well down, I should be getting around 0.7 bar (1.7bar absolute) and not 0.4
I needed more information about what was going on, but unless I wanted to spend hundreds at the rolling road it was going to be a slow check process. I'd heard of some data logging equipment that Malcolm Robb has, with this you can see and record exactly what the ecu is doing during the course of a drive. All the parameters are logged to a file which can be converted to data which is then fed into a spreadsheet. Will Reeve built me the electronics hardware, Malcolm provided the source of the code and logging software.
I have a little circuit board mounted in a box, this plugs into the ALDL socket in the egine bay, the other end plugs into the serial port on my laptop. See here for a professional explanation of all this stuff because although I can use it, how it all works is beyond me !.......I'm just ripping off the hard work other guys have already done ;-)