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159: BMW Direct Injection on MoTeC: Genius or Headache?
159: BMW Direct Injection on MoTeC: Genius or Headache?
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About this episode
Greg Strom (Strom Motorsports) breaks down why modern direct-injection BMW tuning is far more complex than port injection—especially when using MoTeC standalone. He contrasts dyno “numbers” with real race-lap durability, then walks through DI fundamentals like injection timing, fuel pressure control, MBT ignition mapping, and the knock/mixture sensitivity that can swing power with tiny timing changes. Greg also shares his path from racing and coaching into motorsport engineering, plus real-world GT4/GT racing lessons on limp modes, traction/ABS behavior, and why factory ECUs can be frustrating. The episode ends with his current B48-focused parts/business direction.
Topics:
BOP balance of power
Bosch
cam timing table
commission
compression ratio
data log
ECU
endurance racing
engine building
engine tuning
Cars:
BMW M3
Port-injected engines and aftermarket standalone ECUs go hand in hand—but controlling direct-injected engines is far less charted territory. Brett Strom from Strom Motorsport has been deep in the weeds mastering BMW’s B48 on a MoTeC ECU, and he’s here to break it all down—plus much more.
👉 Use the code ‘PODCAST500’ to get $500 OFF HPA's VIP Package: https://hpcdmy.co/podvip
In this episode of Tuned In, Brett shares his journey from young racing enthusiast to professional racer and engineer. He dives into the realities of building a career in motorsport and the rapid evolution of technology. We also get into ABS, traction control, and the strategy behind endurance racing.
We unpack Brett’s hands-on experience with racing and tuning, focusing on the complexities of direct injection. From injection timing to fuel pressure behaviour, he explains the intricacies and what really matters when tuning DI engines on a standalone ECU.
The conversation also covers choosing the right ECU for a particular application, dyno tuning versus real-world performance, the challenges of building reliable race engines, and why MoTeC remains his go-to platform.
Brett’s done a lot in the world of motorsport—and we’ve only scratched the surface. From racer to engineer to tuner and builder, his depth of experience makes this one a seriously compelling listen.
👉 Use the code ‘PODCAST500’ to get $500 OFF HPA's VIP Package: https://hpcdmy.co/podvip
Follow Brett Here:
Instagram: strommotorsport
Youtube: strommotorsport
WWW: strommotorsport.com
Timestamps:
0:00 BMW Direct Injection on MoTeC: Genius or Headache?
4:40 How did you form an interest in cars?
7:32 First car BMW E30
10:29 Advantages of spec racing series
13:59 What were you going to do for a job after university?
18:30 What was wrong with the BMW factory ECU?
21:59 Why did you pick MoTec?
27:25 You've done an EFI course, what happened when you started tuning?
32:21 How did your career as a racer develop?
41:23 Running a motorsport based performance shop. How hard is it?
45:59 Challenges of turning late model cars into race cars?
56:04 Is it not until GT3 level cars that they’re actually factory built race cars?
58:23 Motorsport grade traction control and ABS
1:06:41 What’s the challenges of controlling a DI engine with a standalone ECU
1:27:58 Are you adding port injection to these engines as well?
1:30:01 What is the benefit of Direct Injected engines and how do we tune them?
1:47:36 Do you need a complex standalone ECU and which one?
1:59:00 B48 engine swap into BMW E36 & E46
2:02:18 Final 3 Questions
Filter:
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Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Company
High Performance Academy
"for those who are new to the TuneIn podcast, High Performance Academy is an online training school. We specialise in teaching people how to build performance engines, how to tune EFI, how to construct wiring harnesses."
High Performance Academy is a training site that teaches people how to build and tune performance engines. They also teach practical skills like wiring and using data logs.
High Performance Academy (HPA) is an online training school focused on performance engine building and tuning education. The episode mentions their courses covering EFI tuning, wiring harness construction, and data logging.
Concept
track day
"...worked at a shop cleaning the floors to kind of learn what I could. Yeah I got to do my very first track day actually so this was I think it was like 1997 and I was 16..."
A track day is when regular drivers get time on a race track. You’re not usually racing other cars side-by-side—more like practicing and learning the track.
A track day is an organized event where drivers can use a racetrack for practice and fun, usually with limited or no wheel-to-wheel racing. It’s a common way to learn car control and driving technique while managing risk and costs compared with full racing.
Car
e46 M3
"my dad picked up an e46 m3 with the smg like they had just come out with that and we started doing track days with that because it was a lot easier for me to drive because I couldn't shift"
The BMW E46 M3 is an older M3 generation. It’s a performance BMW that many people track, and the version mentioned uses an SMG transmission that can make driving easier for someone who can’t shift normally.
The BMW E46 M3 is the fourth-generation M3 (produced in the late 1990s to early 2000s). It’s known for its track-friendly balance and, in SMG-equipped cars, a semi-automatic transmission that can help drivers who can’t use a clutch normally.
Concept
spec racing
"[614.9s] for racing for spec racing is the speccy 30"
Spec racing is a format where cars are kept close to identical (or tightly regulated) so competition depends more on driver skill and setup within the rules. The speaker later ties this to small power differences and shared suspension/brake rules making driver talent more important.
Term
slicks
"it's on 280 width slicks"
Slicks are race tires made for maximum grip. They work best on dry track days and help the car stick better when you accelerate and brake.
Slicks are race tires with no tread pattern, designed to maximize grip on dry pavement. They typically provide much more traction than street tires, which changes how power and braking translate into lap time.
Company
MoTeC
"Interestingly though the MoTeC West Coast office at the time for USA they don't have it anymore but was was a couple... once I kind of got it going... I called up Shane Tecklenburg because he was he's the MoTeC guy... it’s 800 bucks for the day to come down and tune it"
MoTeC makes aftermarket computers for engine control. Tuners use it when they want more control than the factory ECU, especially for custom builds.
MoTeC is a high-end aftermarket engine management brand known for standalone ECUs and professional tuning support. In this segment, it’s the system the speaker is using to start and tune a BMW engine, and they’re discussing getting help from a MoTeC specialist.
Term
ECU
"because most ECUs will have some kind of trigger scope or ref sync capture so you don't actually need to break out the oscilloscope... every calculation for fuel ignition is based on that information being valid."
ECU is the car’s engine computer. It reads sensors and decides how much fuel to inject and when to spark the plugs.
ECU stands for Engine Control Unit. It’s the computer that reads sensor inputs and uses them to calculate things like fuel delivery and ignition timing in real time.
Term
ignition timing
"just such a powerful way of showing exactly what the ignition timing's doing to the engine torque. Interestingly Todd from Mainline upgraded us to their new Pro Hub firmware and it's lost that"
Ignition timing is when the spark happens in the engine cycle. If it’s too late you lose power; if it’s too early you can get knock and damage.
Ignition timing is when the spark plug fires relative to engine position. Changing it affects cylinder pressure, torque, and knock risk, so tuners often map timing across different RPM and load conditions.
Term
data log
"Oh really? Well there's a different way of doing it with a data log so essentially there's a logger that's running the whole time and if you've got torque and ignition timing you can log those two parameters against each other and it'll show you that graph"
A data log is a recorded file of what the car/dyno measured during the pull. You can review it later to see patterns that weren’t displayed live.
A data log records sensor values over time so you can analyze relationships after the run. Here, they’re logging torque and ignition timing against each other to recreate the missing graph feature.
Term
torque
"if you've got torque and ignition timing you can log those two parameters against each other and it'll show you that graph but at the moment"
Torque is the engine’s pulling force. Tuners care about it because it’s closely tied to how much power the car makes in the real world.
Torque is the twisting force the engine produces, and it’s a primary metric tuners optimize for. In this segment, torque is plotted against ignition timing to understand how timing changes affect engine output.
Concept
BOP balance of power
"...if you back in the day... it was a lot easier to get the cars to be kind of equal you know effectively BOP balance of power now or performance that was..."
Balance of Performance (BOP) is a racing rule system that adjusts things like weight, engine output, or other limits so different cars can compete more evenly. The speaker connects it to modern racing where technology makes it harder to “naturally” keep cars equal.
Term
cam timing table
"and trying to figure out what was the cam timing table it was like I have nightmares about it."
A cam timing table tells the engine computer when the camshafts should move. If it’s set wrong, the engine can run poorly or not make power. It’s one of the more sensitive tuning areas.
A cam timing table is part of the ECU calibration that controls when the camshafts open/close relative to engine speed and load. Getting it wrong can cause poor power, rough running, or even engine damage, which is why it’s a common “nightmare” area for tuners.
Concept
engine tuning
"...like obviously we do engine tuning we're also designing suspension components and we do obviously I do driver coaching..."
Engine tuning means adjusting how the engine runs so it makes more power or drives better. A tuner changes settings like fuel and timing so the car performs the way you want.
Engine tuning is the process of modifying and calibrating an engine to achieve better performance, drivability, or efficiency. In a performance shop, it often includes changes to fueling, ignition timing, boost control, and how the ECU responds under different conditions.
Concept
endurance racing
"...paid me to come because I I could both drive with him or or drive with the team if we were doing endurance racing but also would consistently like if we were having problems..."
Endurance racing is long-duration racing where the car has to last. It’s not only about speed—reliability and careful setup are just as important.
Endurance racing is motorsport where cars run for long durations, testing durability as much as outright speed. Setup choices—cooling, fueling strategy, reliability, and driver stints—matter heavily because failures are costly over long races.
Concept
limp mode
"at the 24 hours of COTA where the car suddenly went into a limp mode like an hour into the race and no indication as to why it's just it's a factory race car"
Limp mode is when the car automatically cuts back power to protect the engine. It happens when the computer thinks something is wrong, so you can keep driving (slowly) or get back to the pits.
Limp mode is a protective strategy where the engine management limits power to prevent damage when it detects a fault. On race cars, it can be triggered by sensor issues or cooling/intercooling problems, and it often reduces drivability without clearly explaining the root cause.
Concept
inlet temperature not shown on the display
"it didn't tell you what the inlet temp was on the display which is insane like you'd think of all the values that you would want to know on a turbocharged race car like that"
Sometimes the car knows something is wrong, but the driver screen doesn’t show the key number. If you can’t see the inlet temperature, you may not catch the problem before the car limits power.
This highlights a motorsport systems integration issue: the ECU may detect a problem and trigger limp mode, but the driver-facing display may not show the underlying parameter (inlet temperature). That delay in actionable information can turn a solvable cooling/sensor issue into a race-ending event.
Term
manuals
"[3216.0s] in we rented two rental cars so that we could both practice driving manuals and we got the [3220.3s] cheapest rental cars we could and you know my co-driver was paying for this stuff"
“Manuals” means cars where you shift gears yourself with a clutch. If you’re not practiced, it’s easy to shift at the wrong time and lose performance or stress the drivetrain.
“Manuals” refers to driving a car with a manual transmission, where the driver selects gears using a clutch and shifter. Learning manual technique matters in racing because mistakes can cause poor acceleration, missed shifts, or even engine over-rev situations.
Concept
oil pressure
"[3270.6s] what was happening is that the pan wasn't baffled very well so under braking it would lose oil pressure"
Oil pressure is how strongly the engine’s oil is pumped through the system. If it drops—like during hard braking—some engine parts don’t work correctly and the car can throw faults.
Oil pressure is the pressure of lubricating oil in the engine system, and it’s critical for actuators and hydraulic components. In this segment, low oil pressure under braking is linked to a fault in the BMW Vanos system.
Term
wheel lockup
"[3642.6s] you see Formula One cars admittedly not very often but you see Formula One cars locking up a [3647.3s] front wheel coming into a corner well the answer is no they can't so yeah abs for me yeah"
Wheel lockup is when the brakes are so strong that a wheel stops turning and starts sliding. That usually makes the car harder to steer and can increase stopping distance.
Wheel lockup happens when a tire stops rotating and skids, usually under excessive brake pressure. The speaker uses Formula One examples to argue that without ABS, maintaining control and consistent braking performance is not achievable in all conditions.
Company
Bosch
"[3732.1s] lap time it is quicker it's interesting you say that because when the the deal we had with that [3732.1s] Bosch motorsport abs unit was we were given it by Bosch motorsport Australia and we're very open [3738.5s] about the fact that yes we were given a very expensive piece of equipment but also from the"
Bosch is the company that makes the ABS hardware used in racing. They’re saying they tested it and shared what they learned instead of just trusting marketing claims.
Bosch is mentioned as the supplier of a motorsport ABS unit. The speaker discusses testing it openly and reporting findings, implying the system’s real-world performance can be evaluated rather than assumed.
Term
compression ratio
"and there it's just stock stock engine 10.2 to 1 compression so it is scary in the sense that like if you're trying to push power right away on them"
Compression ratio is how tightly the engine squeezes the air-fuel mixture. With boost, higher compression can make knock more likely, so you have to tune carefully.
Compression ratio is the ratio between the cylinder’s maximum and minimum volume. A higher compression ratio generally increases thermal efficiency but can also make knock more likely under boost, requiring more conservative tuning.
Term
rev limit
"now I think the stock rev limit on these is 7000 and I just had a car out this last weekend that we were pushing to 7800"
The rev limit is the RPM ceiling the car won’t normally exceed. It’s there to protect the engine, so raising it is something tuners do carefully.
The rev limit is the engine’s programmed maximum RPM. Modern ECUs use it to protect the engine, but some tuners and drivers can exceed factory limits under controlled conditions if the engine remains stable.
Term
wall wedding
"The first time I was tuning [6553.4s] acceleration enrichment and the whole idea of wall wedding, I was like, this is crazy."
This sounds like a mis-heard term, but the idea is that fuel can “stick” to the inside of the intake for a moment. When you change throttle quickly, that stored fuel affects how much fuel the engine actually gets, so the tune has to account for it.
“Wall wedding” appears to be a transcription error for a tuning concept related to fuel film on the intake tract (often discussed as “wall wetting”). The idea is that fuel can temporarily stick to intake surfaces, so the ECU needs strategies to compensate during transient throttle changes.
Term
commission
"...you use the ECU that the tuner you've chosen suggests. And they're not suggesting that ECU because they're making 40% commission on that versus 20% on something else."
Commission refers to a sales incentive the tuner or shop might earn for recommending certain products. The speaker explicitly addresses this concern, arguing that ECU recommendations aren’t primarily driven by commission differences but by professional capability and alignment.
Company
Haltech
"but at that time Haltech wasn't super popular in New Zealand. And I felt that those two products"
Haltech makes aftermarket computers for engine tuning. Tuners use them to control things like fuel and ignition, and the speaker is saying it wasn’t very common in their area at the time.
Haltech is an aftermarket engine management ECU brand commonly used for tuning and motorsport. In this segment, the speaker notes it wasn’t widely popular locally, which affected what options were available for customers.
Term
plug-and-play harness
"So yeah, so we're doing Motec plug-and-play harnesses for these where you'll just be able to plug the thing in."
A plug-and-play harness is a ready-to-install wiring kit. It helps prevent wiring mistakes that can cause the car to run poorly or not start.
A plug-and-play harness is a pre-made wiring adapter that connects the vehicle to an aftermarket ECU with minimal modification. This reduces the risk of incorrect pinouts, missed connections, and configuration mistakes that can prevent the car from starting or cause unstable behavior.
Term
air flags
"And every single time I logged into that ECU, it was like, oh, look, there's like 32 little air flags here."
“Air flags” are settings inside the engine computer that tell it how to interpret air-related sensor data. If they’re wrong, the car may not run correctly until the settings are fixed.
“Air flags” likely refers to ECU configuration/status bits related to airflow or sensor interpretation (e.g., which inputs are enabled or how the ECU expects air-related signals). Misconfigured flags can cause incorrect fueling/ignition behavior or prevent proper operation until corrected.
Concept
perceived value around price point
"[7574.6s] also I think if you're charging yourself out at a rate that's too low, there's sort of perceived [7580.0s] value around price point. So if you're charging out yourself too low, you're charging $500 [7587.7s] for a tune and everyone locally's $1,000, almost people look at that and are like, oh it can't [7592.2s] possibly be any good if it's $500"
People sometimes think “cheap must mean bad.” If your price is much lower than everyone else’s, some customers may assume the work isn’t good, even when it is.
The speaker is describing how customers often judge quality based on price. If a tune is priced too low compared to local competitors, people may assume it can’t be effective, even if it is.
Concept
charging for expertise vs time
"[7615.9s] No. And I think it is important to realize exactly what you just said, I had the same issue with [7621.3s] with feeling or putting in the time to solve problems and then you get, you fix the problem [7625.9s] and you're like, oh, well, I guess I should have known that, I should have done that first, you [7629.9s] know, only to realize that like, no, you had to go through the steps and it's unlikely someone [7634.7s] else could have figured it out faster. You got to charge for it. So. Absolutely. I think that [7639.5s] where that goes almost the other way though is where you come into a job and, you know, [7645.1s] someone's been driven crazy by this problem that no one's been able to fix and they've [7649.2s] poured hours and hours into it. So look at it, look through the thing and I know what the [7653.5s] issue is and you've fixed it in five minutes. And so what do you do? Do you build them for [7657.8s] the five minutes of time or the 20 years of experience that you've gained along the way?"
Sometimes you solve a problem fast, but you only can do that because you’ve learned from years of similar issues. The price should reflect that know-how, not just the time you spent that day.
This is the idea that professional work isn’t just the minutes spent on the final fix—it’s also the accumulated experience and diagnostic process. The speaker contrasts “five minutes to fix it” with “20 years of experience” that made that quick solution possible.
Company
strongmotorsports.com
"And then our website, strongmotorsports.com, is where I'm probably going to hire a media guy soon because I'm not good at it. And I get so busy with the technical stuff"
They mention their website, strongmotorsports.com, where people can find what they do. It sounds like it’s connected to the tuning and products they’re selling.
The speaker references strongmotorsports.com as the website tied to their business and technical work. For listeners, this is likely where they can find products, services, or educational material related to the tuning work discussed on the show.
Concept
VIP package
"don't forget by using the code podcast500 at checkout, podcast listeners can get a huge $500 off our VIP package which includes over 40 current courses as well as a long list of courses to be released in the future."
A “VIP package” is being promoted as a paid membership tier that includes a large library of courses and ongoing access. In the context of performance education, this implies structured learning (not just one-off videos) and continued updates via webinars and a community forum.
Concept
lifetime access
"As a VIP, you'll also get lifetime access to our members only webinars and our community forum. Lastly, we'd love it if you could leave a review or comment"
They’re saying you keep access to the content forever. That’s helpful because tuning knowledge changes, and you may want to rewatch or review things later.
“Lifetime access” indicates the membership provides ongoing, non-expiring access to webinars and community resources. For technical tuning education, this matters because engine management strategies and best practices evolve over time, so being able to revisit material is useful.
Concept
engine building
"we are an online training school and we specialise in teaching a range of performance automotive topics. Everything from engine turning and engine building through to wiring, car suspension and wheel alignment, data analysis and race driver education."
Engine building means taking an engine apart and putting it back together (sometimes with upgrades) so it can make more power or handle harder use. It’s not just “bolt-on” work—there’s a lot of careful assembly involved.
“Engine building” is the process of assembling and modifying an engine to meet a specific performance goal. It often includes choosing internal components, setting clearances, and ensuring the engine is assembled to handle higher loads.
Concept
wheel alignment
"Everything from engine turning and engine building through to wiring, car suspension and wheel alignment, data analysis and race driver education."
“Wheel alignment” is the adjustment of suspension angles (like camber, toe, and caster) to ensure the tires track correctly. Proper alignment improves tire wear, straight-line stability, and cornering consistency—especially important for performance driving.
BMW Direct Injection on MoTeC: Genius or Headache?
How did you form an interest in cars?
First car BMW E30
Advantages of spec racing series
What were you going to do for a job after university?
What was wrong with the BMW factory ECU?
Why did you pick MoTec?
You've done an EFI course, what happened when you started tuning?
How did your career as a racer develop?
Running a motorsport based performance shop. How hard is it?
Challenges of turning late model cars into race cars?
Is it not until GT3 level cars that they’re actually factory built race cars?
Motorsport grade traction control and ABS
What’s the challenges of controlling a DI engine with a standalone ECU
Are you adding port injection to these engines as well?
What is the benefit of Direct Injected engines and how do we tune them?
Do you need a complex standalone ECU and which one?
B48 engine swap into BMW E36 & E46
Final 3 Questions
Select text to request an explanation
Well, and I think that's the big thing too, because you see all these like, I call them
dyno queens, but like the numbers that people throw out for stuff on some of these new DI motors,
it won't do that on the racetrack. Tuning on the dyno and tuning on the racetrack is two
so insanely different things. And if you tried to run those lambda numbers for an entire lap,
let alone eight hours, it just melt the turbo.
Welcome to the HPA Tune In podcast, I'm Andre, your host and in this episode we're joined by Greg
Strom from Strom Motorsports in the US. Greg has got a very, very elaborate and interesting
backstory. He's gone through just about anything and everything in the performance
automotive space. He's a race driver who's raced at the top levels of GT racing both in
the US and in Australia. He's a driving coach, he's a race engineer. He now runs a motorsport
business, building cars and supplying parts. And he's also got a fairly thorough understanding
of aftermarket engine management, some of the more subtle aspects that go into engine management
systems on current generation direct injected engines. This is something we haven't dived
into too much in detail so far in the podcast. When it comes to port injected engines, adding
aftermarket standalone engine controllers is a relatively well trodden path. But in the direct
injected world this is definitely not quite so common. And a lot of people are either converting
direct injected engines to port injection or if they are remaining direct injection,
then quite often or most often they will actually be tuned using a reflash package to
basically recalibrate the factory engine management system. We talked to Greg about his
B48 BMW engine package that he provides that can be tuned anywhere from about 260 wheel horsepower
up to 460 wheel horsepower, all on a completely stock standard unopened junkyard engine.
This is cost effective racing. Controlling a sophisticated engine like this though is not
quite so straightforward. And here Brett has gravitated towards the MoTeC product range.
So we talk a lot about the integration of the MoTeC control strategies with these late model
direct injected engines, why directed injected engines can provide more power potential than
a port injected engine, how we can incorporate more fuel with port injectors once we exceed
the capability of the stock direct injectors. And we also get down in the weeds with some
aspects such as fuel pressure control, characterising direct injectors and direct injected pumps.
And also how the engine performance is affected by aspects such as injection timing, fuel pressure,
lambda target and if you have got port injectors added in addition to the direct injectors,
how the ratio between port and direct injector can influence this as well.
Before we jump into our chat, for those who are new to the TuneIn podcast, High Performance
Academy is an online training school. We specialise in teaching people how to build
performance engines, how to tune EFI, how to construct wiring harnesses. We also cover topics
on fabrication, 3D modelling and CAD, race driver education and data logging just to name a few.
You can find all of our courses at hpacademy.com forward slash courses.
All of these courses are delivered in high definition video modules that you can watch
from anywhere in the world provided you've got an internet connection. This means you can learn
from the comfort of your own place and you can learn at your own pace. All of our courses
also come with a 60 day no questions asked, money back guarantee. So if you purchase them
for any reason at all, decide it wasn't quite what you expected, no problem, let us know,
we'll give you a full refund. And for podcast listeners, you can also use the coupon code
podcast 75, that will get you $75 off the purchase of your very first HPA course.
We'll put the coupon code in the show notes to make it nice and easy for you to find.
Lastly, if you like free stuff, then I've got a great deal for you.
We are constantly partnering with some of the biggest names in the aftermarket performance
industry to give away some great prizes. You can always find our latest prize at hpacademy.com
slash giveaway, it might be an aftermarket ECU or dash, it could be some engine components
or engine building tools or just about anything in between. They are great prizes and we will
ship them free of charge to your door if you're the winner. There's no tricks here,
no purchase required to get your name into the draw. Alright enough with our introduction,
let's get into our interview now. Alright welcome to the podcast, Brett, thanks for joining us today
and as we do every episode, let's start by learning how you got involved in cars or how
you got an interest in cars. Yeah I mean I've always loved racing since I was a kid, like RC
cars for sure before I could drive real cars and like always wanted to race but as everyone knows
it's super super expensive and when I say race I mean road race I was always or I call it road
racing in the US but circuit GT racing I guess and touring cars but yeah the did a lot of had
my first car was an E30 325 and you know learned to work on that. My dad or my parents are like
not mechanical at all so kind of had to figure everything out from scratch and worked at a
shop cleaning the floors to kind of learn what I could. Yeah I got to do my very first track day
actually so this was I think it was like 1997 and I was 16 and I got to tag along with the shop
I was working for and do like I was just gonna help people with their cars whether they change
tires whatever it's like a private track day thing but I got to bring my E30 and I drove
I think it was just an open track at Willow Springs so I drove like three plus hours in my car just
annihilated the tires and then got to drive my boss's E30 M3 and then got to drive a old 2002
race car like a 76 2002 I think it was and just I think I got like six hours of track time in one
day like everyone was just like okay get off get off track like that's that sounds like the dream
and you said 16 yeah I was 16 so I was that yeah that's where it started and then it was hard to get
back there because like getting again going to the track still costs a lot of money so yeah
racing isn't cheap yeah and even just track days I mean any of it so yeah I really wanted to
pursue that but went to college and was doing track days just as when I could but it was really
like twice a year and some autocrossing so long story short though then weirdly I got in a really
bad car accident on the street and took me about a year to walk again from that and yeah so the
funny part about that though is so I was still in college and I was pursuing mechanical engineering
and business degree but I was really into sports before not like really sports but was pretty
athletic before that and I kind of messed up my legs pretty good in that car accident so
my dad picked up an e46 m3 with the smg like they had just come out with that
and we started doing track days with that because it was a lot easier for me to drive because I
couldn't shift and so yeah he kind of took pity on me and like we got to go to the track doing that
and I was I was definitely quick so the weird part after I healed a little further is I convinced
him to help me get an e30 m3 race car to go racing in BMW club on the west coast it sounds
like there's a very strong BMW flavor in your background here as we'll find out as we get further
into this sort of carry carry through to the current projects you're involved with yeah and it's
I didn't have any like huge love for BMW when I was a kid there was it was nothing specific my
brother's first car was a Nissan 240z or a Datsun 240z no it just happened to be that I picked up an
e30 325 because that's what I could afford and that was you know you could turn it into a pretty
good little car to drive on the street but no there was no like it wasn't like I had some huge
brand passion at the time but I definitely once I got that e30 I definitely started to get into it
and was started seeing DTM racing and the history of the e30 e3 and it was weird I got that car
because that's what I could afford and I wanted a rear wheel drive car that actually that sounds
hilarious now with the price of e30 m3s it's a car that I've kind of always had an interest in
owning one but the value proposition now just I can't get my head around I mean here in New
Zealand for a decent tidy one just a street car not a race car you probably circa 150,000
New Zealand dollars I'll say maybe I guess that'll be about 80-90,000 USD and I mean I'd probably
get some hate from the BMW lovers I mean in all honesty and stock form they're not that great
they're definitely not fast yeah I mean e30 m3 is is and a lot of them have a lot of miles but
is a complete letdown when you go drive it like it's so it's so slow until you and if you you
can do a lot of stuff and they have so much history which is what makes them cool but
you know I would take any 36 m3 or an e46 m3 over that car any day if I just want to go drive
and on the track they are like it's kind of pathetic unless you know as compared to modern
cars especially but you know you can do a lot of stuff to them and and my old boss that I used to
race with we were building s14s that were going to 9,000 rpm and I'll get into that later but
you can make them very quick but man I mean like a core motor now is like 27,000 dollars it's like
it's not you don't buy it to go have fun you buy it because you have some love for the
the brand or your collector or something so yeah of course while we're hating on the the e30 m3 I
mean I also grew up in the era of Australian touring car racing where the group a m3s were
decimating some cars that on paper should have been far far quicker around race track like
Bathurst so yeah it's not to say they they can't go fast just in stock form hey it needs a lot of
work and that requires a lot of money to be tipped into them. Yeah and I mean I will say too I just
put a I think when they were new back in the day certainly for what was available at the time they
are in terms of the handling like so much better and they punch above their weight like you know
if you're just going off of what they make horsepower wise is on paper is terrible but
on the track they still run a good lap time so I will say one of the better classes out here
for racing for spec racing is the speccy 30 you know an original 325 had about the same
wheel horsepower as an m3 I've had some of my best races in that class you know when you get 30 of
those cars on track together it is it's a lot of fun for sure. Yeah I think I think that's
something that can be said for spec racing irrespective of which particular car it is.
I mean it's easy when there's a relatively open rulebook I mean yeah I'll just make up for a
lack of driver talent with another 30 horsepower and you know to a degree that works up to a point
but you know when you've got a field of cars that are probably separated by 5 to 10 horsepower
the absolute most and they all have the same suspension and brakes then it really truly does
so driver talent I think. Well it's also yeah in a way like for example like any 30 handles I mean
it's not a good rear suspension on that thing so you go do a qualifying lap and you're like
you're just like that was such a good lap like I was just freaking on the edge every corner
smashed every curb like just rode the ever-living crap out of this thing and you look at the
lap time you're like holy crap that was slow but like it felt you felt like a hero in the thing
so I mean there is that to be said about it too. Yeah yeah I think there's something to be said for
I'm not calling it necessary a slow car but there's more enjoyment in a slow car being driven fast
than a fast car being driven maybe just average I think you know knowing that like you just said
you've extracted everything you could out of that lap there's nothing left on the table.
Yeah that's one thing I was going to say too because I'm like I'm a car guy but I'm a racer
at heart like I that's what I love the most is like door-to-door racing and extracting the most
out of the car and what's interesting about that is I certainly enjoy driving a balanced car you
know if you give me a car that's 800 a horsepower and it's just completely overwhelming the suspension
and the tires and everything it's not that's not fun for me anymore that's just kind of just annoying.
I get it. And what's actually really interesting the I find that a lot of drivers you take you know
that aren't at a high level in a super high-powered heavy car you take power away and they will
often go faster and there's a series out here at a racetrack it's a club track where they have all
M2 CSRs I don't know if you're familiar with those race cars. Very very vaguely. Yeah so there you
know it's a factory race car from BMW it's an M2 has no aero it weighs 3600 pounds with the driver
it's on 280 width slicks I mean it's the things a pig it's got 420 wheel horsepower and so we're
out here in the desert and when they have a particularly hot race they'll pull the power
sticks and drop them down to like 360 at the wheels more than half the field goes faster. Wow.
Like it's it's absurd because they can actually they're they're breaking at the right spot coming
into the corner they're not overwhelming you know they're not just understeering like crazy
past the apex like it's pretty funny to watch but you know these are all like some members track
that they're doing this at so it's older rich guys but it's it's funny they they all go a lot
of them go quicker with a slower power. I think that that's sort of for a maybe a non-professional
driver does make sense though because you're sort of you can use the power that's available when you
don't feel like you're you're sort of walking that that tight rope of whether the thing's gonna
brake loose go sideways and put you out into the kitty litter it's um yeah just easier for a novice.
Well the time when you look at the data it's all because I do some coaching it's it's all in the
breakings breaking zones on the long straights because they're they're so fast coming into the
corner they can't judge it correctly and then they blow the entry and they don't roll the speed so
they lose the whatever the seven mile an hour they gained down the straight they lose entering that
corner and successive corners you know so it's interesting it's all it seems to all be in the
approach to the corners not necessarily the exits. Okay well I think we've thoroughly derailed our
convoy so far but that's all right so all interesting stuff but we'll sort of get back at
and we started this journey where we were talking about your E30 M3 race car uh you also mentioned
your mechanical engineering degree on that note with the mechanical engineering degree
we're at that point where you sort of seeing your your life going in terms of what you're
going to do for a job. Well what I should say is uh I actually don't have a mechanical
engineering degree I took a couple years of it and I was trying to double major in business as
well because that was sort of the deal I made with my parents that uh they're like you can do
whatever you want as long as you also get into business degree and and help me go to school so
the things I was doing at the time and would definitely do things a little differently of
course but I was in school long enough at that point and that that car accident put me behind
quite a bit so I had to make a decision that I was like I'm going to be in school for another
like two and a half years or I could just knock out this business degree in a year and go work
which is what I really wanted to do so I was I went to USC and all their engineering math classes
were taught by math professors and not engineering professors and I'm a very conceptual person like
I need to understand how things work in the physical world so they would just like write these
equations on the board and this you know some of them are like Eastern European or Chinese or
whatever so it's like super thick accent here's the equation here's how you solve the equation
and I'm like yeah what do you do with this yeah I kind of get that as well yeah and they're like
what do you who cares you just solve the equation that's like so I was like okay this isn't for me
and I'm I'm not once I got to differential equations I was like I don't want to do this anymore so I
do love math I do love physics I just realized that that path and what I was trying to do wasn't
was a waste of time and wasted money so I still you know I can still do derivatives and all the
things that you need to do sometimes when you're trying to figure out what a PID loop is doing but
the formal education I just I wasn't interested in at that point yeah so anyway I was at the time I
had started racing like I said I got that E30 M3 and I think we picked it up for like 14 grand and
it was just a total pile of junk like looking back on that car now is just that thing was an
absolute mess wiring was a disaster I think it had been on fire at one point I mean I don't think I
would sign that car off with an annual tech at this point if I saw it now but that's what I got
that's what I learned in and yeah was immediately won my first race with it which was obviously very
exciting and kind of was really really really passionate about driving more than anything
and and learning to race so I would do a race weekend and and it was difficult for me to
afford a lot of track time so that was somewhat limited but I would take my video and this was
before data logs were common this was like 2004 so I was trying to get some sort of data logging
thing but it was difficult so I would watch my video like literally probably 15 hours like just
over and over and over and take notes and and learn and read all the books and do all the stuff
and think about it and watch racing so got really really really into it and so I was
pretty quick out of the box and people asked me to start coaching them pretty quickly you know
and then I realized okay well like beyond the driving now like now I'm a good driver the
car's a pile of crap so really figuring out how to like all the suspension stuff and and and the
rules were limited so power was actually not the thing at the time we had to run a stock ecu and
those things but yeah I was really just trying to learn as much as I could and was was super
passionate about it so when I graduated from college it was kind of a weird circumstance and
it's funny because it sort of set up my whole life in a way I had to have a couple more surgeries so
I couldn't go work right away but the guys that I was racing with were like hey just when you
like come do parts and stuff at the shop with us like you know we'll just work here while you're
figuring it out so I started doing that and I was able to work on my race car after work
and then I just stayed like it was like okay this is part of the furniture now the short version
because it's you know a multi-year story is just that I that was a BMW service shop and I
raced with the owner raced with the other guys over there we were all racers so we'd all bring in
our cars after work and work on them till 11 o'clock at night and you know moved up to managing the
shop for a while doing that and yeah just got got really really really into the racing side but was
just doing more street service during the day to pay the bills and then got more into motor building
and realized like oh these stock ecu's whether it was on an e30 m3 or or an e46 ahead of the time was
like this isn't working could not get the cars to run right basically constant problems so
what were the issues that you are seeing with the stock ecu's one was actually finding anyone
that could tune them so it was so this was around 2007 where I started to get into that stuff and
you know so I'd put the thing on the dyno and the the air fuel would be like the way we were doing
that back then was you just get a chip from a guy that's like oh this is the right you know this is
the tune for the motor that you have and in hindsight I'm just like oh my god yeah that doesn't work
no and these are you know and this is like the stuff we were running there's no closed loop lambda
there's no like it's very very basic super old stuff yeah I actually remember I remember exactly
the same situation I there was a couple of the BMW spec series races that that I used to run their
cars on the dyno these guys were actually pretty serious about it as well and they that you weren't
a programmable ecu but you could chip the factory ecu and you know we'd run the car on the dyno
and the guy would would come in with a suitcase full of all of these little chips to try and you
know these were these are these chips that are being sold over ebay or wherever it was and you
know guaranteed to give you 13 more horsepower and all of this and you'd run them all and they
were all absolute garbage none of them were anywhere close to the mark but you know that
that was the best they could do and I I didn't didn't have the ability to actually burn a new
eprong for them so it is what it is yeah and it's I mean some of the classes also required like you
had to run the stock ecu there wasn't a choice but I always started to get into what was called the
mod class and so then the only rules were really like based on displacement like you you had to run
you know between a 2.2 and a 2.97 liter was like the cutoff that they did for for a specific class
that was really popular yeah so we were my boss had an e30m3 and he was we were building you know
better and better engines and the tuning just was not keeping up and it would it would like go
in a fault like not fault mode but it would just wig out and the car would just start misfiring or
just weird stuff so I was like okay well and I had built a a 2.97 liter engine for this specific
class with huge cams and high like it's like 13 to 1 compression I think an old BMW 6 cylinder and
just tried to run it with what people claimed would be the right software or the right chip at
the time and it was horrible so decided I was going to figure out standalone and you know had seen
it kind of new enough about it but so I actually took I knew I needed to know the basics so I took
an EFI 101 class from Ben Strider yeah and he was I mean that was fantastic got to go you know
spend two days with him and and learn and a whole group and it really taught me also like
how to think about these things because he really is a first principles thinker and teacher so you
know the fact that I understood like okay more more air more fuel less timing like these are the
these are the fundamentals of this thing I was like but what what do you see you do I get and so I
researched it and I was like well if I'm going to do this you got to do it so I picked up an M800
and I just went straight to the what I perceived as the best at the time and I think it relatively is
still actually an incredibly powerful ECU even now I think one of the drivers behind
moving on from them is they were struggling to get some of the chips that they used to make
the old 100 series ECUs but yeah I ran one on my drag car, put plenty in customer cars, very
powerful. Interestingly just when you were trying to research the best ECU to go with at that time,
what was the shortlist and what was it about MoTeC that made it the pick for you?
You know I honestly can't remember what the other ECUs were at this point I think
AEM was in the running, was it HalTech? You know I'm not sure to be honest I can't remember what
the original ones were it was I think I did have a shortlist and I went and talked to Ben
like I had already researched it before I took his class and he was like yeah if you want the best
then this is what you got to get and I didn't understand what the best meant knowing what
I know now looking back I kind of have no concept of what I even knew back then like
I knew so little you know which I went to wire that car from scratch to make my own harness
and do all that and it's like that was it took me months to get that car started because I just
I had no help like there was no one else that I knew. Interestingly though the MoTeC West Coast
office at the time for USA they don't have it anymore but was was a couple I don't know 10
miles from me so definitely they gave me some advice but they didn't have specific knowledge
to that BMW engine and I do remember very specifically though once I kind of got it going
and trying to figure out what I was going to do because I wasn't sure if I was going to tune it
myself yet and I called up Shane Tecklenburg because he was he's the MoTeC guy yeah and and
you know now he's like you know he's huge and I guess relatively he was huge then too but he
he was like yeah it's 800 bucks for the day to come down and tune it and it's it's a whole day
and I was like oh man I can't can't afford that like that's that's a lot in hindsight it's that's
not a lot at all but I just knew nothing like I was just diving in I was like I'm just gonna
try and figure this out and hope to do it so I did do a lot of research but still like I didn't
know for example that the 97 M3 cam sensor I was trying to use was a very specific sensor that
it's not a hall effect, it's not a VR sensor, it's just like this super special digital pulse.
That's I think the trick but when you're dealing with something that is so unique and you don't
necessarily know I think probably the bit that trips most people up trying to get an engine
started on an aftermarket stand loan is always the trigger system be it a weird sensor like you're
just talking about there that's probably a little bit less normal but you know not understanding
trigger patterns and how to set that up in the ECU. These days I think we're a bit more spoiled
because most ECUs will have some kind of trigger scope or ref sync capture so you don't actually
need to break out the oscilloscope and see the signals, you can actually physically see what
the ECU is actually getting on the ref and sync inputs and that's just worth its weight in gold
in diagnosing some of these issues but yeah if you don't kind of have a good understanding
of that trigger information, I mean that's the two most or the most critical information the ECU
needs because every calculation for fuel ignition is based on that information being valid.
Yeah and it's honestly comical to stuff that I know now and what I was like doing then and the
things I was trying, you know long story short I did figure out that it was this special sensor
that like won't work you just got a back date to an earlier model and I still had just so many
challenges on that first engine getting it started but that's the thing like I just struggled through
it like I'd go work on it like every day after work for like three hours, four hours and that's
the thing like while it took me all that time to get it working that all the struggle is what taught
me so much more. If that thing had just started up I wouldn't have learned anything so yeah
the old saying still holds true, you learn more from the failures than you do from the successes
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Alright let's get back to the episode. Now moving on to actually once you had it up and running,
you've taken FA universities, FA101 course, so you've got a bit of an understanding of what
you're trying to achieve and how fueling affects the engine, how ignition timing affects the engine,
what MBT is, etc. When you actually came to applying this firsthand, what's the sort of,
is there any disconnect between the theory and the practice?
No and I got so lucky on one thing and that is that I was able to book a mainline dyno
for this guy had one and he had just picked it up and he wanted people to rent it and he
he ran it to me for like 300 bucks a day. Yeah no that's what I'm saying, so lucky.
And he was all excited about it so we linked the MoTeX to the dyno through Canvas which
took a bit of figuring it out and so it was logging the timing and the engine RPM and the
throttle so I was able to literally go through every cell on that engine and tune the MBT of
every single cell because I would do my little curve on every single load path and it would
give me the little graph and it'd show me a little dot and say hey this is 26.1 degrees MBT.
Yeah actually I do that demonstration for as long as HPA's been alive, we do a live
introduction to engine tuning webinar so we'll invite people long, normally get maybe
1,500 people sign up and on the day maybe between 2 and 600 of those people will actually turn up
and do a little 45 minute lesson on the dyno, we talk about fueling, show how that works and then
do some steady state tuning and then when we get to the ignition timing I'll do a MBT test on the
mainline dyno and show them, you sweep the spark from let's say 5 degrees through to 50 and it gets
that nice curve exactly like you expect and yep as you say it'll show, this is MBT, I think it's
just such a powerful way of showing exactly what the ignition timing's doing to the engine torque.
Interestingly Todd from Mainline upgraded us to their new Pro Hub firmware and it's lost that
feature. Oh really? Well there's a different way of doing it with a data log so essentially
there's a logger that's running the whole time and if you've got torque and ignition timing you
can log those two parameters against each other and it'll show you that graph but at the moment
they haven't quite got it back to displaying and this is MBT for that particular cell.
So I'll keep pestering them, it was a great feature so hopefully they'll bring it back.
That being said there's so many more features in this new setup that are amazing, it's definitely
brought Mainline kind of up to the modern era I think but we're not here to talk about Mainline
Pro Hub firmware so we'll get back to your story of learning how to tune.
Well no and that's what I was gonna say because I tune mostly on a dyno jet now
and both due to space constraints and just that's what I kind of have and it's, if I had tried to
tune on this dyno and the way it works on that very first engine I think I would have
made a lot of mistakes that I didn't make just because I had that feature and the MoTeX stuff
made it. So I mean that's one of the big things, it's so easy you know with Quick Lambda and with
that MBT feature like and it's a single, it was a M52 based engine so it was like had a single
Vanos you know the inlet cam could just switch from one spot to the other.
Yes and not continuously variable just switch cam.
Yeah just single and so it was perfect engine for learning to tune on had just enough stuff to
change I could you know kind of play with the fuel injection timing and realize that wasn't
doing much on a raced engine and but not enough complexity to really get yourself in trouble with
it. Yeah and tuning the full throttle stuff you know all the load the proper load stuff was
ridiculously easy I mean it was almost like with that dyno and setting MBT it practically
does it for you so I got really lucky with that. The hardest part honestly was getting the thing to
had huge cams so getting it to like idle well and take off well and transient throttle fueling
definitely those were challenges that I didn't under struggle to get right but all the
full throttle stuff and getting that thing to run just like super safe and max power was
honestly super easy was the easiest part of the whole thing out of all of it so yeah so it was
immediately on to the next one. Okay so at this point is this where you sort of started doing
more and more tuning? Yeah I didn't have a plan with it I just knew that again I'm a racer
at heart I definitely at the time was like had dreams of being a pro racer and wanted to try
and go more towards that path so. Well let's maybe park the tuning the problem with this interview
is you do so many different things I'm trying to thread the needle of keeping them all together
in a sensible format. We'll park the tuning because I've got a lot more of that that I
want to talk about when we get further into the interview but maybe let's just sort of
carry on with the career of becoming a pro racer how did that sort of develop?
Yeah and that's another thing you know I look back on all the things that I did and the decisions
I made on stuff and I wish I had networked more I guess I would say to understand what
it took to do these things I just kind of just pushed in the direction of whatever made sense
at the time but didn't really have a bigger plan for it so I was doing you know I just
thought being a good driver would make it so I could be a pro racer which is obviously a fool's
errand on every level so unless you have massive quantities of money and are a good driver then
the path to pro racing is insanely difficult and again it's more about being there being at
pro races and networking than what I was doing which was continuing to club race and coaching
people and trying to you know I just thought if I got really good and eventually I would get an
opportunity to test with a with a team and at the time it was grandam or speed world challenge
or something like that so I just didn't really understand how it worked all the way and I didn't
have any people that I was around that were like hey dummy like the seats it's not gonna work yeah
you knew you'd go be at the track if you want to get in these cars so yeah I was just focused on
running the business that I was running but club racing and doing a lot of that and I was
I was at the track a lot I mean we were doing a lot of racing and I was like I said I was coaching
people but around 2008 or 2009 we were like we were starting to get sponsors from stuff so we
were doing like the 25 hours of Thunder Hill I don't know if you're familiar with that race but
the guys that I raced with we won that a couple times and we were getting sponsorship from like
Nitto and Sparko and some other stuff so I thought I was doing okay but mostly was just kind of
keeping along doing the same stuff for a while because I wasn't I didn't understand
what I needed to do that moved to the next level so finally I did get to do one Grand Am race and
realized like just the level of resources that it takes to do that kind of stuff you know as at
the time it was for the lowest class was 40 to 50 grand a weekend can you can maybe just explain
what Grand Am is for those who haven't heard heard of it before yeah sorry it's IMSA now so it was
yeah it was they had ST and GS at the time so ST was like we built a an E 93 30 and then GS was
like an M3 and Camaros and whatever so they were this was still before homologated pro cars so you
had to build your own car and there were Mazda's and there was it was a really cool time for racing
because there was still people were building the chops were building their own stuff beam world and
Turner and and all those guys so super cool series but still once again if I had like
actually gone to the track before that and spent some time with these teams I would realize the
level of commitment to be able to do that stuff and the true cost of what it takes so
just a little a little side tangent here but just as you mentioned this before sort of pro
cars or factory built race cars were commonplace do you think shop built cars versus professionally
built cars from from the manufacturer have we lost something going sort of more towards the pro
cars is it better is it worse what's the worst the advantages I would say a lost has a lot has been
lost but I think it was necessary with the changing of technology I think you know if you back in the
day if you had like especially pre-turbo charging you could cheat but it was a lot easier to get
the cars to be kind of equal you know effectively BOP balance of power now or performance that was
getting more and more difficult as the cars became more and more advanced and I think for
the series for any of the series running these type of cars the technical know how to be able to
make sure that they're all compliant and and then class them all I mean I remember when we
built our car there was so many highly specific rules like I mean you had to run this you had to
run a Sabon hood it was like for if you built an E90 you had to run the Sabon hood just because
that was they were like we need everything to be equal and the first guy that built an E90 did that
and so then they made that the rule it's an interesting rule yeah and there was like that for
if you built a Mazda you had to use this specific part and this control arm and this thing so that
was I think the only way that they could try and make the cars equal if everyone could do their
own thing I kind of feel like just making everyone run the stock hood would probably also achieve that
and be cheaper yeah I forget why they they had some reason for it I can't remember why though
I do know the stock E90 hood was insanely heavy on a non M3 but the Sabon hood was still like
it was add so much it was that thing weighed like 40 pounds it was a joke I I don't know if it was
Sabon but a friend of mine here locally in New Zealand who had a Mazda RX 8 drag car and those
things are really heavy in stock form and he he took the box on on every part that Sabon made as
doors heard the the works and when I actually picked one in the mouth I'm like there's
almost no difference it was it was an aesthetic thing rather than a performance and weight saving
thing yeah it was definitely not built for for performance yeah no and it didn't even
fit that good it was it was I mean yeah that's a subtle side tangent but it was it was such a weird
that was a weird rule but and you had what they did do at the time they had switched over to
you had to run a Bosch Motorsport ECU so this was 2010 when I was building this car
and that thing was terrifying to tune so I was only a couple years into kind of tuning
and I get this Bosch Motorsport ECU that is like all it's it's all acronyms everything's
German acronyms like you you have to know what you're looking for to like I still can't get over
the complexity of trying to tune that thing and it was an amazing ECU in terms of it's like
the background math that's going on in it but like do tuning that thing was an absolute nightmare
it's still an ECU that to this day I have not touched and if I'm honest I am a little bit terrified
of the concept as well you're not putting my mind at ease there either no I wouldn't touch
one again I've had people ask me to tune them and I'm like zero chance like in the software
and maybe they've changed it and I think it was a an MS 4.3 I'm pretty sure it just had this whole
it's just a list of acronyms and then you had this like 200 page manual and you'd have to look
up what the acronym was to know what that table was and then search it and and and even then like
the translation of what the acronym was all translated from German so like it didn't say
like fueling table it was like volumetric you know efficiency something something something
and it yeah and trying to figure out what was the cam timing table it was like I have nightmares
about it. It sounds unsurprisingly exactly like Yuzu Win OLS on a Bosch ECU because obviously the
technology is the same of their road car ECUs they haven't reinvented the wheel to make a standalone
it's all the same stuff but yeah technical German engineering words and the other thing
seems to remember there's quite a few terms and really there is no English equivalent it doesn't
translate across which is also fun. Yeah the one cool thing it did do is it showed you every in
the user manual everything was it showed you the equation of how everything was calculated.
I see as you know the background math that's occurring. Yeah so that was helpful because
then you could actually you you could backtrack to figure out what the name of a table was because
you're like oh this this is related to this so that must be you know whatever but yeah that
kind of made me want to give up that thing was crazy hard and that's honestly one of the many
things that sort of pushed me towards narrowing my focus to just mo-tech stuff. Long story short
I did that and then I sort of got frost I put all my resources into running building that car and
running it and realizing just how hard this was and you know takes a village to run a race team I
guess you could say in a way so I got a little over it for a while and didn't really want to keep
pursuing that and then I was like you know unfortunately I just really do love this like I
don't want to go away from this so I at that time you know I had been learning a lot so around
2014 I told my boss at Bullet Performance the shop that I work for you know I want to do more
motorsport stuff like within this shop like we can grow this as a business and we already had
people coming to us for stuff we would work on occasional race cars but it was we worked on our
own we worked on some people's race cars but it was not a central part of the business and that
shop did a lot of revenue we you know we had like seven techs and only worked on BMWs and we were
just cranking out BMW service like really really well managed and there's a lot of you know that
shop taught me a lot about business frankly so I want to do more motorsport stuff and we did that
for like six months and I was building like the f82m4 had just come out so I was the first one
building one of those in a race car I had a client that wanted to do that and we were doing
speccy 46 racing and a bunch of different stuff but after it was maybe it was a little over like
nine months maybe my boss was like you know you're doing more revenue than the service business
but the profit margin is like so bad I wanted to I wanted to query you on this because I mean I
ran a motorsport based business and it's a tough way of making a living I always looked at you
franchise service dealerships and a car would come in for a cam belt and I don't know it's got a
three hour book time so that's what the customer gets charged plus parts and you've got a tech that
does you know five of them, ten of them a week and he can do it in 45 minutes so you know the tech
gets paid for 45 minutes work, the customer gets charged three hours so that's a nice little bit
of margin in there whereas I kind of feel with the performance and motorsport stuff for the
most part it's the opposite of way around, you're doing a lot of one off jobs where you never
go to do that exact same job again so it's difficult if not impossible to price accurately up front
and then you sort of get to the end and you've put 40 hours into it and you know like look at the
bill and think there's no way I can justify this so the customer sort of ends up getting charged
30 hours he's still probably angry and thinks he've overcharged him so he's sort of going
backwards I mean that's just been my experience is that? No I mean you've that's literally
that was the perfect description of what actually happens. Okay so it's not just me, good to know.
Yeah it's it is so such a brutal business like if you hate yourself start a motorsport business
that's basically how you do it. I'd say the flip side of the flip side of that though is I think
if I had started a you know just a general maintenance service business I'd probably
go stir crazy because it's not exciting and interesting to me. Yeah and that's and that
was the issue I was we had a really successful business and you know like I could have gone and
done real estate I could have gone done a lot of things but there's enough there that you
can do more than just one thing you know like obviously we do engine tuning we're also designing
suspension components and we do obviously I do driver coaching like there's other all these other
aspects to it that are not just you don't have to be super narrow. It's all around cars but very
different aspects of the automotive performance industry. Yeah but yeah I mean motorsports really
is like building club type cars or it's exactly what you said you can't it always takes longer than
you expect you're always learning you can always do it better is one of the other problems you
you figure out a good way to do something and you're like well if I do it this way it's even
better so then you try the new way and then you have to learn more and then it's like
it's brutal but that's what you have to if you have a passion for it that's what you're going to do
you're not just going to stagnate so he basically looked at it and it's like he's making 40 45%
margin on service parts and you're lucky to make 20 on a lot of motorsport parts which that's
gotten even worse in some ways so I 2015 I uh split off to do my own thing at that point um
and and had some really good you know I was able to take the clients with me and that I had and
then weirdly enough then that's the stage where almost kind of by chance um I started to be able
to do the pro stuff and most of it was because I did have such a strong technical background
while I am a good driver the the guy that I was mainly doing a lot of the international stuff with
you know paid me to come because I I could both drive with him or or drive with the team if we
were doing endurance racing but also would consistently like if we were having problems or
car setup or whatever I always knew what to do with that stuff because he actually did this guy
before I started working with him he had another driver with him who is just a driver
and he would get frustrated because the guy didn't know enough about anything else so
so you kind of kind of went from uh not being able to afford to race at that level to sort of
accidentally falling into now racing that level and getting paid for the privilege
that's um it's pretty good if you can get get to that yeah and it's funny because what actually
happened this is very interesting we were one of the first shops to build like m4 race cars because
we didn't think that BMW said they were not going to build a GT4 car so 2014 we started building a
couple of them learned more than I would have liked on canvas stuff and other things about
those cars and that's yeah that was brutal like trying to get those to run as proper race cars
you should not touch the stock systems basically but I built some cars for this guy and he was
I was supporting him in club racing and um some other stuff just uh just coming coming back at a
step there just um we were talking about these you know new m4s and trying to figure it all out and
don't touch the stock systems it just triggered a memory there I was fortunate enough to compete
in the Bathurst 6 hour last year um albeit in the slowest class there was just a little Toyota
86 that was fine and uh you know the fastest class cars there's um a bunch of BMW M2 competitions
and they're fast, they're insanely fast but then they'd go into some kind of limp home mode,
they'd end up trundling into the pits you know did half a lap at 60 kilometres an hour or whatever
it is and then they'd you know have guys on laptops so basically control out, delete,
send it back out and do another 10 or 15 laps and then the same thing would happen,
do you know is this sort of a common theme with these later model BMWs or later model
performance cars when you try and turn them into race cars?
Absolutely, yeah I mean like it's so there's so many things that go wrong and I mean I have a
memory of that's why we built our b46 race cars like so we were at one point we were running four
m4 GT4s kind of all over the world and so in a lot of endurance races so those cars were breaking
like constantly I mean there was just like all sorts of weird stuff but we did we had one race
at the 24 hours of COTA where the car suddenly went into a limp mode like an hour into the race
and no indication as to why it's just it's a factory race car but doesn't tell you anything on
the display just no power comes in, BMW engineer hooks up the laptop loads the fault codes and
he's like oh the the inlet temp sensor is broken and I'm like the temp and what do you know he said
the wiring to the inlet temp sensor is broken and I was like what are you talking about okay and like
I said I mean I know a lot about cars and a lot about engines and I'm like that is so unlikely
like I can see the sensor I can see the wiring to it like that it just doesn't make any sense
and so I kind of look over his shoulder and then I and I look I was downloading the data log
and looking at that and I'm like dude it's the temp is just off the scale is the problem and I open
up the you know these are water intercooled and I open up the reservoir and I'm like there's no
frigging water in it. That'll do it yeah so I was actually trying to protect the engine from
extreme and take your temperature. But they didn't they used an aim display on those cars so they
didn't on the early cars this was 2018 they didn't have enough memory or what I never got a great
explanation but it didn't tell you what the inlet temp was on the display which is insane
like you'd think of all the values that you would want to know on a turbocharged race car like that
would be a pretty good one and no warning for it so the car had just gone to a limp mode without
telling us and fortunately I figured I had no water and we're in the middle we're an hour into a
24-hour race and I'm like okay well the only way the water goes anywhere is obviously there's a leak
there's nothing under the car so it's it must be leaking into the intercooler on the engine
so anyway so we fill it up with water and and the BMW engineer meanwhile is like
he's like no no no we gotta we gotta check the wiring we gotta I'm like dude you get out of here
like go you're useless go away. I think that's the disconnect as well between an engineer who
you know may know everything about his job but maybe he doesn't have that practical element of
having actually worked on cars driven cars race cars and tuned cars as well you know sort of
understanding all of the nuances of something like an intake air temp sensor that's giving him
a reading that doesn't seem plausible. Yeah and it's I think because I think it was reading 100
Celsius or something and it's so it's just not like and I think the the BMW the motorsport computer
was giving him things that would cause that and one of them was not intercooler has no water
and even to at this point I knew there was water leaking into the thing but I was like we're losing
laps so I just dumped water in it bled it real quick put the cap on sent the driver and I was like
we're gonna we have a spare car so we're gonna practice changing this intercooler because like
it's not a two-minute job it's I think the the book time's an hour and a half so
drivers driving around we start practicing changing that thing that my guys do it twice
meanwhile the car had sucked down all its water again so it came back in refilled it sent it back
out and then brought it in and did did the intercooler change in like three and a half minutes
wow it was like yeah I mean I had some really good mechanics for sure but we we practiced it and
they knew the tools they needed they had the parts ready they knew they had practiced it
and we came back with some other actually crazy problems in that race but we came back
and won that race after that wow you would not expect that yeah I mean other everyone else had
problems too there's one team with another m4 that put a pack of ice on their uh their fuel pump
controller there was we like the shit that happens is is is comical and I think I think
with endurance racing I mean half of your success or failure comes down to the luck of the draw as
to how many problems you had on the day and uh you know not getting tangled up in someone else's
accident as well yeah it's not just about raw lap speed and how good you are as a driver it's
everything has to come together on the day and you just don't know how that's gonna go
yeah I mean if you're if your car stays running you have good pit stops and you don't wreck you
could usually go four seconds to lap slower and still still compete now obviously not at like
Lamar or or the you know the highest end yeah that's a slightly different deal yeah but like most
what I call like you know medium level pro racing you can you know where there's not it's not all
factory teams and everyone's obviously depends on the size of the field too but even then those
those races like there's problems that you don't even know about that the teams are often dealing
with on the fly and alternator is not charging correctly like whatever all kinds of stuff so
yeah I think that's the endurance racing is such a different animal it's almost never
about very rarely about how fast you go you got to check all the other boxes first we inherited
the the second step on the podium purely because the car that was leading our class which was
three quarters of a lap up on on our entire class at that time maybe four and a half hours
into the race and one of the belts broke which runs the water pump and that happened you know
maybe going up up the mountain straight so by the time they got back to the pit the thing's
toast you know there's no way out of it and so that was just pure luck of the draw but I mean
I'll take second place however I can get it yeah I don't know if you know I did that I did the
bath or six hour also in I think that was 2018 and we got we got second overall in a
A1 car I think it was at the time but that race we almost dropped out of because the car kept
going into lint mode pretty consistently coming out onto the mountain straight I got a turn one
and you would almost if someone was if you were like in the middle of passing someone
it was a BMW 135 so like it had the N54 motor um you get on the gas and the thing would just
and you'd almost wreck because like some guy's expecting you to go or they've popped in behind
you or like you know you're just so my co-driver was like dude forget this like I'm not I don't
want to do this very dangerous yeah because you'd have to cycle so you'd cycle the main
and you turn it all back on and then you'd have to turn off traction control I mean while you're
still trying to shift oh and and it was for us it was a problem because it was a right hand drive car
and I don't drive right hand drive cars yeah I almost launched the motor on like lap one putting
in the wrong gear is pretty amazing but and we I'm super minor aside we we went to when we flew
in we rented two rental cars so that we could both practice driving manuals and we got the
cheapest rental cars we could and you know my co-driver was paying for this stuff it's pretty
wealthy so they're like oh you're a premium super platinum member we got you these you know
Mercedes car and we're like no no we want like the piece of crap like with the manual and they're
like no no no it's free upgrade we're like no no we don't want the upgrade we want the biggest piece
of crap they're like we only have one car with the manual oh my god so yeah so I was I was driving
around the roundabouts around Bathurst trying to like learn you know how to properly shift because
it's so unintuitive for me with and if you watch the video of that race too like so many of my
left hand apexes I'm missing by like two feet because I'm afraid I'm gonna hit the wall with the
left side of the car so yeah anyway but that that car I mean that was another thing like that was a
technical thing that I was fortunately had worked on so many street cars and knew how this stuff
worked what was happening is that the pan wasn't baffled very well so under braking it would lose
oil pressure you didn't know that though what the result of it was was the Vanos could not hit his
position so it would fault out because it had no oil pressure I don't think they were logging
like a proper oil pressure sensor just has a dummy light so we finally figured out it kept
throwing this fault and I'm like why would it throw Vanos fault you know we thought about
it in this and that and then they added some oil at one point and then it went away and I was like
dude it's it's the oil like yeah that's the one so anyway we but we almost dropped out of that race
that's uh that's possibly not um not that easy to kind of join the dots between those two things
particularly if you're not logging will pressure yeah it's not not an immediate uh sort of thing
that you would jump to being wrong right yeah and that's the thing with not having standalone too
you you don't I can't just download a log and look at everything and see that oh the cam duty cycle
you know the actuator is going nuts and is a hundred percent and the thing's not achieving
its position like there's so much that's one of the beauties of mo-tech I mean you can log in and
like if you're logging in channels you can pretty much figure out anything that's one of the things
that uh all that street car knowledge and and diagnosing all that stuff really helped a lot
in running those GT4 cars because we had I mean we just had all kinds of weird issues on them and
everyone does whether it's an Aston Martin or Mercedes or a BMW like all those cars are based
on street cars it's not it's not a proper race car in the sense that it's it's a street car with a
cage and some yeah you know BMW added some modules to make everything work when they took the seats
out of it but like is it not till you sort of step up to GT3 level where now you're actually talking
about a sort of a ground up factory built race car as opposed to a modified street car?
Generally yes I think there are I'm not positive on this there's a couple GT4 cars I believe that
run standalone systems I think I don't know that for sure so but the ones that all the BMWs run factory
ECUs but we we also had an M4 GT3 and that runs a Bosch motorsport ECU and is yeah is everything's
properly controlled we'll say and very cleverly controlled on a lot of it but the stock ECUs are
yeah they're just problematic in so many ways even even for BMW because when they did the EVO
package on that car the traction control in the car was miserable I mean it was useless like you
couldn't it would just kind of do its thing and the street car does where it falls on its face and
they had tried to tune it so the EVO package was supposed to have better traction control
but apparently they still it still is nothing like a proper you know if you have mo-tech and
it's doing ignition cuts and all these things it still would like consistently be behind on helping
you if you if you wanted traction control and it would over cut or cut too long after you'd
picked that traction back up if you looked at the wheel speeds and apparently the issue with that
because I talked to them about it was inherently like the layers of the firmware in the ECU
the most base layer is emissions based stuff so like they can't just do they can't be like oh
you know we're we're Bosch and we own this like we're just going to do an ignition cut
it doesn't allow it like you can't get to that low of a level in the traction control layer
there's layers below it that don't allow those things to be changed and I think the complexity
of the software is such that there's not going to do it at that point so is this around the
fact that an ignition cut for traction control would be devastating for emissions is that what
you're sort of getting at here I think so yeah it's weird because it would always do it torque
based with a throttle which is just way too slow like it's never never gonna you need some instantaneous
control yeah that latency with throttle ignition retard yeah I mean you would think but I don't I
guess but it didn't it just doesn't yeah it wasn't in there and maybe they've done that on the new
ones the g82s I haven't really looked into it but um on the f82 it just even with the evo package
it was way better but it it still was nothing like a real motorsport system yeah I think when
people who maybe haven't tested a lot of different ECUs or systems with traction control
you know you have the term traction control so do you think traction control is just traction
control right but there is traction control that will yes it'll stop the wheel spin but
you might as well turn the ignition off which is going to achieve the same outcome and then
there's traction control that has that so finely tuned that it's barely noticeable but it's going
to stop you exiting backwards through the corner yeah yeah and and and you still get a fast lap
time yeah well and you get a better lap time I mean you go to Laguna Seca and if you stand there
because like the pits where the exit of the last corner is you hear GT3 cars come out of that corner
and they are just riding the track just all the way out of the corner and you know you
you cannot as a driver achieve that level of control of it's you know it's like abs like
you don't same thing like you can you can get close as a driver but you're not going to
individually control your wheel speeds and you're not going to update it a hundred times a second
with your foot you know it's a funny one with the the abs as well we did a video on on the
Bosch motorsport m5 abs system which we've got in one of our race cars and we did some testing
everyone says how great the Bosch motorsport abs is but that's sort of is it the emperor's new
clothes sort of situation I just spent 20 grand on this abs system plus installation so obviously
it has to be good and what we actually did was something you never do in a race car was 200
km an hour to zero dead stop and I can't remember the numbers off in the top of my head now but
when we did the test post abs I actually doubted I'd written the numbers down correctly the first
time around it just seemed unrealistic it was it was that much better and as soon as we put that
video out you know people are saying oh yeah a good driver can stop just as well without abs
is with it and my argument there's like yeah sure if your name's Max Verstappen but even then like
can you also do that every single time he hits the brake pedal every single lap as the tyres
degrade as the fuel load burns off as the track rubbers in all these variables and the fact that
you see Formula One cars admittedly not very often but you see Formula One cars locking up a
front wheel coming into a corner well the answer is no they can't so yeah abs for me yeah and I mean
it's actually super basic like you are not if you had four feet and had four separate brake
pedals then maybe you could do it like drums but like each wheel is hitting its own bumps
and loot has its own traction it is you turn in the front left is losing load you know like there's
zero chance you can do it with your foot so especially in trail braking is where abs really
really you know as you see a Formula One car starts to turn in and now is locking the brakes
it is interesting because I've found that on certain tracks the abs like in an m4 gt3 for
example so Bosch m5 it's it is worse if you smash the brake pedal if you're riding the abs in the
corner it is slower if you're applying too much brake pressure but if you're using it so that
you're right at the threshold and you have your brake bias set correctly and you're using the abs
to help you over the bumps and help you as you turn in then that's the fastest way it's sort of the
the man in the machine like in conjunction tends to be the fastest way if you're just absolutely
hammering the brake pedal and riding the abs all the way and you know you think about what the wheel
is doing depending on track surface and tires of course but if the tire is statically sticking
to the ground and now it's kinetically sliding and then sticking again if you can just get it
up to that threshold and not keep crossing it then it's going to be quicker and I mean in
lap time it is quicker it's interesting you say that because when the the deal we had with that
Bosch motorsport abs unit was we were given it by Bosch motorsport Australia and we're very open
about the fact that yes we were given a very expensive piece of equipment but also from the
outset I said to Bosch I'm going to report what we find chances are it was probably not that risky
because otherwise you wouldn't see them in every GT3 car but I got told by them which
kind of flies in the face of what you've just said that you have to retrain yourself to basically
in a hard braking zone treat the brake pedal like a switch and just hit it as hard and as fast as
you can and the reasoning behind that I was given is if you get a driver like maybe someone from
the Australian Supercars series they're used to driving analog cars with no ABS and then they
get into a GT3 car and they'll be threshold braking as they would in the supercar and the
problem he said is basically if you're just on that threshold of lock up the ABS unit can bleed
pressure off to unlock the brake but then it doesn't actually have a reservoir of additional
pressure to apply back and relock the brake so whereas if you hit the brake pedal as hard as
you can you've got this reservoir of additional pressure that's unnecessary but as it locks and
bleeds that pressure off it's still got some there so yeah it's too completely
polar opposite views on that. I'll take your experiences probably accurate.
Well no and I have it in the data that absolutely what I'm saying is true but it is track and tire
dependent like on a track surface that is extremely smooth and there's not a lot of like friction
once the tire starts sliding I mean if you think of the extreme of like wet marble
and you're walking on wet marble you can kind of be stuck but if you start sliding
you're screwed like you're you're sliding a long ways so I think very smooth tracks on slicks
where there's not a lot of granularity of the surface there's if the tire starts sliding it
it doesn't you know the friction coefficient falls off a cliff. Sure yeah they might sit.
And that's the that's the track that we are doing a lot of thermal out here is like that
if once you start losing grip you lose a lot it's not like a little bit versus you know there's
other tracks out here where the difference between static friction and kinetic friction
between sliding and not is five percent is ten percent it's not a lot because the track surface
is so grainy that the tire is just scrubbing across it so I think that's true on that type
of track surface or or in between but definitely the one that we're doing the most testing at
was was not true it was it was much worse if I jumped hard on the abs and I think it's all
it's all relative of course say your your max brake pressure where you're going to
before lockup is 80 bar and you're riding it at 120 bar that's worse like you're going to stop
worse if you're at 78 bar then of course you're going to stop worse than if you were just riding
the abs you know yeah okay yeah just a little bit more so so yeah I think it's all relative and
that's the thing with pro racing I mean that's why some of these guys you you watch um Van
Ginsburg and get in the car whatever it is like he figures stuff like that out quick and or max
for stopping or whoever that's you know these these next level drivers that you're like how
were they going that much faster than these other pros so consistently and it's all those little
details yeah it's interesting actually with van gesburg and he's done quite a lot of gt racing
well he did obviously prior to a shift to nascar in the us and um I imagine he's he's telling it
like it is he says that uh in the gt cars he always wants all the driver aids essentially
turned turned off I'm not sure if that's just for traction control maybe maybe he's just talking
about traction control but um his preference is to to drive the thing and log which I guess you
know he's built up that feeling understanding with his career and supercars as well not everyone's
got his level of skill and uh and feel for the car though yeah yeah totally that guy's amazing
and I think well one thing I have noticed too is when you run a car with really aggressive
abs in particular I'm not sure about the traction control thing because that's
kind of a no-brainer for me at least but the abs it does kind of throw you off when the pedal
kicks back super hard like it's hard to then get your threshold right so maybe when he's trail
braking and stuff he's like I don't want this thing bothering me I'd rather have the tires slip
just a little more or whatever so yeah hard to say on that one but obviously whatever he's doing is
working. Yeah I don't think we can probably use him as a good ruler for every other race driver
should do. Look there's so much more that I want to talk about with the racing but there's also
so much more that I want to talk about in general so I think we're going to park your amazing
international GT racing career for this interview and move on. I want to come actually back to
the ECU stuff and talk a little bit more about that so we've sort of already gone a little
way down that rabbit hole with your experience with MoTeC and what I want to sort of talk about
is some of the most of the stuff I guess you're doing now is all around direct injected engines
which I think for a lot of tuners is quite scary. I think it's still fair to say that
in most instances outside of pure race cars, DI engines are probably more often being tuned
by reflashing the factory control unit rather than fitting a stand alone and that's for a variety
of different reasons but can you give us sort of an understanding of maybe some of the complexities
of controlling a modern direct injected engine with an aftermarket stand alone?
I mean I'll definitely say it is an order of magnitude more difficult than port injection
especially if you have none of the calibrations for injectors and the DI pump and stuff like
that and I spent you know on the B48 stuff now that I know everything that I know it would
be a lot easier but that first round of it it was I mean I was like deep into the books trying to
figure stuff out and reading all the MoTeC firmware help and things like that you know I would say
that like if you can get those calibration files it's really no big deal and there is you know
you need to understand some stuff but like I had to tune the DI pump stuff from scratch just figure
it out like on the dyno and running the engine which was time consuming and I had to come back
to it a couple times to retouch up stuff that I had gotten wrong that something else was affecting
and I'll say that's the biggest thing on the new engines is like everything is affecting everything
else I mean you change your like especially because the injectors you can change the fuel pressure
significantly so a B48 is running between I run like 12 megapascals at idle and 35 megapascals at
which I think is 350 bar at high load and that the fuel pressure changes a lot of what's happening
in the cylinder but more than more than anything the direct injection timing is so important you
know it's like like I said before with port injection time you just like whatever open the
injector and don't worry about it to a degree yeah TV doesn't I think I think that was a big
unlock for me early in my career I just had it in my mind that injection timing on a port injected
engine was just so super critical and of course then you start thinking well hey at wide open
throttle in 8000 RPM and I'm at 85% injector duty cycle so clearly the injectors almost open for
the entire engine cycle moving it around ain't going to achieve much. Sure at idle and cruise
you know that might be a slightly different story but it's never really shown, it's not
how would I put it, it's not maybe the place to be trying to chase power but yeah direct
injected engines where you really only have a very narrow window where you can inject the fuel
yeah it's going to be a lot more critical. Yeah and it's like I was so surprised because I started
tuning engines on and like I said I didn't know that much when I started about like truly how an
engine runs and so I'm like oh yeah sequential fueling and so to learn that like an E30M3 was
batch fired I was like what do you mean so that just just sprays the injectors like one
really okay like that's interesting and even then when I'm sitting there tuning it at idle you're
like oh this thing's happy at 540 degrees end of injection before you know TDC it's like that's
crazy but that's just the way that port works in evaporation so on the direct injection stuff though
like yeah I mean when you end the injection is super important but you can't start it too early
of course because it's just going to spray it out and it's interesting on the front all the
boatech firmware is limited to 360 degrees anyway like it's just a hard stop it doesn't let you move
past that so I've discovered though at high boost on those things where 10 degrees of injection timing
it can be the difference between knock and knock it's like five 10 degrees in certain ranges and
that's when we're running we're up at like um on some of these engines now about 30 32 pounds of boost
and there it's just stock stock engine 10.2 to 1 compression so it is scary in the sense that like
if you're trying to push power right away on them because I when I started out on these especially
we're we're only really working for about 270 wheel horsepower so a lot of room for air and that's
it was built to specific racing classes but as we've moved up it's like all that stuff the
injection timing the fuel pressure and on those engines too they have such it's like a long rod
small bore long stroke so a half a degree of ignition timing can be like 10 horsepower oh
like it's it's very finicky so finicky just uh just coming back to 10 degrees of timing
could be the difference between knock and no knock what's the mechanism behind that I think it just
has to do with a lot of times it's if you inject it too early you yeah you start the injection too
early at high loads it seems like it must be getting like fuel droplets that are not atomizing correctly
into like the the corners of the piston or something okay I actually don't I don't know
what the mechanism is because it completely goes away as soon as I run higher levels of ethanol
but like on 91 octane where it's like really really knock sensitive if you at lower rpm so like
3500 rpm if I'm in an injection window of like 350 degrees versus like
340 or 30 degrees it's the engine will knock and then I and then I start dropping it down
but what's funny is if you inject it too late then you just lose a bunch of power because
I think the engine doesn't have time to evaporate all the fuel because you've just injected it too
late so there's this this constant threshold that I'm fighting where if I inject it too early
it doesn't uh something happens in the cylinder I'm not entirely sure what to be honest where
it randomly knocks and it's you know it's like it's not consistent is the problem it's not like oh
it's the same one every single time it's like it'll knock and then if you do another run it won't
but if you do another run it will again there's like an inconsistency in the cylinder sorry I
shouldn't say that it's not that it doesn't knock every time it does knock every time I just mean
like that cylinder again in that rpm range so a different cylinder might knock in that same
but if then if I've if I move the timing later so I move it down to 330 320 now none of them
knock and it's consistently smooth every single time I do a run even as I move up temperatures
yeah I guess you don't always need to understand the mechanism behind what's going on as long as
you know that if I pull this lever here it goes away it's fixed okay well cool we don't need to
worry about that anymore sometimes it's nice to know but you don't always have to that's
that's the thing I do want to know sometimes you there's so many things that as I've done this
like on the di engines that I have learned I have figured out why it's doing certain things
like for example because we we also delete like I found BMW's mapping of injection timing and I was
like this is completely different than what I'm running like I don't like why and I tried their
values and I'm like this doesn't work like what am I doing wrong then I realized we're locking out
the valve tronic like the variable valve lift system so when they do that the reason they're
running some of those timing numbers is are you familiar with valve tronic at all or I guess
yeah yeah or actually maybe for those who aren't though a quick a quick explanation yeah sorry uh
so it's it's variable valve lift so at idle it's like roughly 0.2 millimeters at full load it's 10
millimeters it replaces the throttle body there's a lot of benefits to it there's really no benefits
on a race car we get rid of it because we also it's on that motor it's a three phase ac motor like
so there's just no and with all these hall effect sensors in it zero chance we can run it but we
also don't need to with the way we're we're doing it but by reducing the lift you're also reducing
the duration so the valve opening completely changes relative to where the vanos is also
placing the valve opening but what I realized is they are both have very little lift and they're
opening it kind of in the middle of where the piston is already pulling down to get maximum
velocity across the valve so they inject the fuel right as this crazy airstream comes in so versus
us we've already had the valve open for a long time it's you know there's a vacuum on the other
side of that thing so it's not there's not much velocity at any point yeah okay so it makes sense
that their numbers just are irrelevant for your application yeah yeah it doesn't seem to have any
bearing so like I'm injecting the fuel much earlier at idle for example so it has time to evaporate
they're injecting it much later like probably near like 200 and I think what I saw was like 250
degrees or something because I think that's when the valve finally opens and the air swirls in there
at high velocity and then they can mix it really well so yeah yeah so some of that stuff has no
you know I've looked up things that BMW's doing and I'm like oh I'm gonna try that and I'm like wow
this doesn't work at all this is awful oh it's an interesting experiment though yeah just coming
back one step to what you were talking about with the fuel pump control so again for those who
maybe aren't familiar with direct injection you know a port injected engine we turn the fuel pump on
and the fuel pump runs and the fuel pressure is controlled by a regulator that we don't have any
sort of ECU functionality around but with direct injected engines it's completely different and
as you mentioned they're running incredibly high fuel pressures also we're varying the fuel pressure
depending on the operating point and getting control of that fuel pressure so it can track
your target accurately all of the time requires some characterization around the fuel pump which
is generally basically run off a lobe on the camshaft so it's a mechanical very high pressure
fuel pump. I was under the impression that pretty much trying to come up with characterization
data for the mechanical pump itself was near impossible for the end user tuner and that would
be something that would almost have to be done by the ECU manufacturer in your case MoTeC obviously
it sounds like you did manage to sort of wade your way through it though so what what is the
kind of the workflow of doing that? You can set a value in the ECU where it's the so where the
timing of it starts and then you can also just say oh it has this many lobes so like on the early
b40 it said three lobes on the later b40 it said four fuel pump lobes so obviously it can flow more
fuel then you just say what's the lobe separation so it's 180 degrees and so then it kind of already
does like a base characterization now I didn't use that at first I sat there with a dial indicator
and measured out the lobe on the cam and tried to put that into the ECU that did not work particularly
well it got me started though but only then did I realize okay I can still do this with you know
just this this very base value and then slowly work up the fuel pressure or the fuel flow because
it's it's volume based so what I basically did is I got it running good enough and then I let the PI
control move me back to where I needed to be and as I was tuning the car I kept going back to that
table over and over and over seeing what the PI control was and then correcting my duty cycle
for the pump for that fuel volume so I basically just slowly worked my way up to having it be you
know okay at full flow this is what the you know and then it had a nice little the the duty cycle
table has effectively a cam lobe shape in it so the first you know 10% of flow is a lot of a lot
of duty cycle effectively but I think what most people don't realize and the part that really
fascinated me is the ECU is pre-calculating the volume needed and it activates that solenoid to
engage the fuel flow and then it cannot turn it off until the end of the cam lobe so it has to know
when it's going to activate that thing and how many degrees of cam lobe it wants to achieve its
its target fuel pressure and fuel volume right so I definitely had a few spikes in there as I was
trying to is that also calculating for a given fuel pressure target that volume that it needs
to to provide based on what it knows the fuel injectors are currently using per engine cycle
or is it yes yeah so the they all work together and if the characterization of if anything's
not right everything's gonna be off yeah yeah and originally because I the sensor I didn't have
characterization data for the sensor that's on these because I didn't have a way to
pressurize it to a known 400 bar and then the sensor on these motors is also digital output
it's not an analog voltage so I didn't know that my values were wrong first so I was trying to
characterize certain things but it wasn't scaling correctly so if it does yeah if it doesn't know
the fuel pressure or you've you have the wrong translation for that sensor it can do some weird
things for sure or better off well coming to the coming to the characterization of the injectors
which is the next tricky but I haven't actually found anyone that I can send a set of port
injectors to and get them characterized oh actually no that's a lie you can do that with
Motec which is kind of handy but that seems to be quite problematic if you've got a set of
factory injectors from I've just gone through this with our Mitsubishi E09 I can't really get
proper characterization data for those injectors and I mean it's important to have
dead time and short pulse width adder data if you want really accurate control but I mean
I also come from a background where the first link ECU that I started tuning on they didn't
even know about dead time there was no dead time table in there and yeah we could make the engine
run yeah it had did some weird stuff particularly idle from time to time but it got the job done
but on DOI engines this has become just increasingly important and yeah where I'm going with this is
is there a somewhere you can send direct injectors to DOI injectors to and get them characterized
not that I'm aware of and I've tried and I talked to Motec USA and they said no
and they also basically said we don't know where you can send them so I was like okay cool
happy guessing yeah basically so I got out in a oscilloscope and measured a factory car to at
least determine like because they it measures the current that's going through the injector and then
varies that to to pulse it open and then to hold it and so I measured the like I measured the
voltages too but there's you can't do anything with that that's it doesn't care the ECU is doing
everything with current so you have to set those values but what's really interesting about it is
I was surprised by this even with the wrong values in a lot of those because I played with a lot of
things on it the engine still basically ran fine for the most part the Motec hardware seems to do
a really good job of running the injectors and what you will get into is once you get up to high
lows and stuff the injectors will fault out because it's you haven't put in the right values and it
thinks oh it's throwing too much current or it's what or too little or whatever so you do have to
work on like the boost time and things like that but you can actually do a lot of that on a running
engine and not hurt anything I've you know we've got like I said 17 of these running in the field
now in race cars and I've never had an injector field this is your B48 engine package yeah and
they're all varying degrees some are making 240 wheel horsepower some are making 460 wheel horsepower
they all have the same injectors and I did have to spend some time on the oscilloscope on a on a
street car on my wife's x3 actually fortunately has that engine but I was able to figure out enough
and then I what's weird is I actually pulled the injector linearization table from another
injector that I found in the database and I was like I'll just use this to start and see and then
after I had tuned the car I sat there and tried to figure out a way to figure out the linearization
data and started changing it and seeing what the effect was and and just you know changing
at load like steady state changing the one of my favorite things to do to see if stuff is working
correctly is just change the fuel mixture aim 1.05 to 0.8 yeah that'll quickly start you like and
what happens like how how much of a trim correction is happening and I tried tried that at a bunch
of different loads and the linearization data seemed fine so I just stuck with it I was like okay
I think I changed it about like 0.1 milliseconds and I was like this is stuck with it literally I
got so lucky on a couple things with that setup and it was actually funny because we got it started
really really quick and then I've spent the last three years fine tuning it yeah because yeah I mean
the transient stuff is like direct injection is amazing in so many ways starting is like I used
to struggle to start port injection cars sometimes especially if you have huge injectors on them
you're kind of it's trying to sit sitting there trying to figure out the basics of
of a new engine that you've never touched before and don't know anything about
can be kind of hard to get started sometimes this thing literally I the first time I cranked it
just started right up I was I was like astonished in a good way yeah yeah totally one side story
real quick we so this is these engines are the first one we started with was like a 2018 BMW
230 engine so the early B48 and we were putting it in E46 and my engineer like lined it up in the
E46 put it where he as far back as he could and he's like okay that's it and the height is is what it
is it barely fits the oil pan to the subframe so we're like okay well that's definitely where that
goes put a transmission on it looked we're like oh let's make a transmission mount and we're looking
at the back of it and we're like this is like the back of a E46 transmission like this is very
similar so one of my employees runs out to his car unbolts his six speed transmount comes up to
this this B48 with this diesel transmission that we've got on it and just bolts it in the thing
literally landed exactly where it needed to be like we were just like that's like I spent that's
meant to be yeah that's amazing so that never happens it was surprising so definitely had other
crazy weird problems I melted a high pressure pump solenoid at one point and you know broke plenty
of stuff figuring these things out but I mean never blew up an engine and it's been a lot of fun
because they are these engines are like so adaptable I mean you can do so many things with this little
two-liter four-cylinder and and then again with mo-tech on it I mean you can like the sky's the
limit in terms of the ways you can get it integrated to stuff and we've got on the manual cars it has
autoplip rev-match downshifting traction control is amazing being able to set you know throttle
sensitivity tables and all that stuff like it's it's a really cool I keep working with them because
we don't I'm like this does everything we need to do for for race cars like for club racing cars so
no need to try and reinvent the wheel it's just it just does everything right yeah and I will
say the big thing I hate building engines as a business I enjoy it on the side terrible business
yeah it is the worst is so hard like I really respect people that can do that as a business but
like we were trying to build one of the reasons we went down this path is because all the s54s that
we were using were getting old yeah and so we were having to build engines and it's like here's
$20,000 in parts and we get one thing wrong exactly and the margin on those parts is next
to nothing anyway yeah yeah get one thing wrong and you're building a new engine for the customer
out of your pocket you just you just underwater on it yeah and if if the bearing manufacturer
does the bearings wrong or the cam like you know you you're relying on all these other companies
too yeah no I could not agree more yeah terrible business model so so that was the thing with the
b48 we were like we need s54 power our original target was like 330 at the wheels max and that
fits a lot of club racing classes in the series we race in so we looked around we're like you
know what engine can do this and it was like oh this this could do this like we we think it can
and you can buy them for $4,000 and I literally to this day we buy a junkyard engine we put
it in a car I have not pulled the valve cover on a single one like it just you know we changed the
oil pan but that's that's really impressive now you I think if I got the numbers correct I think
you said varying between sort of 260 wheel horsepower and up to 460 I'm assuming the
variability in that power level is just around turbo size yeah turbo size important injection
although we're changing a few other things I never intended on it really making more than
like 350 of the wheels it was really about these specific club racing classes and to replace the
s54 that was sort of the business behind it and and again I'm a racer at heart like I like racing
I don't I don't I don't need the car to go like you know as fast as possible at any given moment
it's like okay we build it to the rules that we're allowed to do and what's the best what's the
cheapest best most drivable most reliable way we can do that because we want to go you know we
want our clients to go have fun that's the point so yeah so we were just looking to replace the s54
because I was like I don't I can't get these from junkyards anymore they're all 180,000 miles and
and they're inexpensive engine to build yeah really nice engine but like oh yeah kind of a
they're just old at this point so problematic I just want to come back to a point a point you
just mentioned there with the higher horsepower stuff you mentioned port injection so this is
kind of one of the issues I guess problems with direct injected engines is it's not like you
can go to injector dynamics or another injector supplier and so I want an upgraded set of injectors
for my direct injected engines in most cases that's difficult if not impossible so you kind of
limited with the small window that you've got to inject fuel and the maximum fuel pressure that
you're able to run there is a massive fuel that you can get into that engine and that's it so that
kind of limits how much power that can make so you're adding port injection I take it there over
on top once you're basically getting to the limit of the factory direct injector then you're adding
port injection as well. Yeah and we actually we just have a plate and it's not ideal it fits the
injectors have to come in sideways because of space constraints but we just bought the plate in
between the manifold and the engine and people make entire manifolds that have injectors but
again our kind of the whole purpose was like how do we do this as cheaply as possible and reusing
as many of the original parts as possible so we did add port injection one of the other reasons
we did that though was over time you know the valves get all gunked up if you're not spraying
some fuel on them we don't want to service these cars super frequently like so we it just made
sense to not that expensive to add port injection because we were already running motec as well so
that was easy at least on the m142 we do have a constraint we have an m122 package now where we
had to unfortunately sort of delete a lot of features out of the whole system because there's
just not enough outputs on the m122 to run everything but also what I just am working on now
there hasn't been a reason to yet but now with the m122 stuff we're doing you can just buy an s58
injector off the new new m4s and just stick that in the b48 like it just pops right in so
we're gonna do that on some of these engines and see how far it'll go but it is problematic once
you start to run a lot of ethanol yeah oh yeah that's yeah yeah when you sort of need to find
another 35 to 40 fuel more fuel to make the same power that that's definitely gonna be an issue
just with a lot of people when they're modifying direct injected engines will just block off the
direct injectors fit port injectors and and call it good uh I'm interested in your experience
so where is the benefit of the direct injection and you know if you were to do that what would be
the difference in the final result in terms of power and torque um to be honest if you're running
a lot of ethanol then I think it matters less now again our port injectors are coming in at an
angle so there's really bad I think fuel atomization happening so I don't we don't use them under like
1.5 bar of uh of manifold pressure um so just half a bar of boost and then I kind of turn them on
so they can start ramping in and get you know get the hot fuel out of them and like try and get them
going but the biggest thing with direct injection that I've really found is if you are octane limited
it is so useful like it is so much better than port injection and if we if I try and use too much
port injection for a given amount of power on like 91 or 93 octane then the engine is just like no
I'm not doing this and I there's like kind of little workarounds that you can do but you definitely
end up having to pull a bunch of timing or just not or it doesn't matter you just can't run that
much boost almost makes no difference what you do with timing so direct injection I have engines
that are running 93 octane where what we typically do is we run like an e30 mix and all our cars are
flex fuel but we run an e30 mix at around 330 wheel horsepower 340 which is where the power a
lot of our cars fit into for class rules and that's really happy with with about 30 percent of the
total fuel volume coming from port injection and the engine just runs it's so smooth then it gets
great economy and I mean it's like amazing on 93 octane if I'm trying to get to that level I can't
run the port injection at all the engine is so unhappy wow so yeah so at that point like I do
have an engine running in it's called WRL it's like an endurance series and they don't want to
run ethanol because it's endurance and they're they're fuel limited for the series so yeah that
that car the port injection just shut off I actually I have I do have it come on a little
bit at part throttle and cruise just so like I said it can clean off the valves occasionally
but otherwise it's all direct injection and I can't even you know I struggle on that fuel I was
struggling to get past like 300 wheel with the port injection but go back straight to direct
injection and actually run in a little bit leaner and it's it's fine up to 320. I have had quite a
lot of experience on the Toyota 86 platform which I think is a really nice training vehicle for
learning about direct injection and of course that has port injection as well when we had a
M1 plug and play kit on both of our cars that had that engine and I must admit when I was
naturally aspirated on that engine I didn't really, it was a struggle to find a big difference
between running 100% port and 100% DI. There was a little bit in it but it definitely wasn't like
night and day but then you're talking you know a naturally aspirated engine probably no surprise
there. We ended up turbo charging that engine but when we turbo charged it we were constantly on
E85. I think it was flex fuel so I think I might have chucked a very basic tune in it for
pure pump gas just so I could run it on pump gas if I ran out of E85 but never really pushed the
limits and then kind of to back up your point when you've got a good octane fuel like E85,
at that point really again it didn't, I needed to use some port injection anyway otherwise
wouldn't have enough fuel but you could have run the thing 100% on port and it probably again
wouldn't have made too much difference but yeah to your point I guess if I was trying to do that
on pump fuel where I didn't really have enough octane things would be very different.
Yeah and one other thing about that that's interesting and I'm curious what your experience
on this was because I haven't seen too much you know stuff like this when you start to get in
the nitty gritty if you go online to try and look stuff up it's either like completely wrong or
people just don't there's just nothing out there and I actually had you know it's funny
because Google Gemini that is like the worst program for looking at or it gives you like a
search result if you're looking for something and a lot of times I end up on your forms you know
reading stuff or getting info no I mean you your forms definitely have some people that actually
know things the interesting thing I did have Gemini at one point quote something on a B48 that
I knew was wrong and I was like where did it get this from and I clicked on it and it had taken
what I had said on a YouTube video where I said said something and then was like I mean this
and it took what I said and didn't get the I mean this part I was like you're literally quoting me
back my own info wrong like this is ridiculous that's actually hilarious scary but hilarious yeah
or at least that it's it's amazingly awful when it comes to card stuff so long story short the
and I'm curious what you know on this I found that when I'm tuning high power levels so like
for that engine like 380 wheel plus it makes a lot more power with port injection if I'm at the
same and it becomes very sensitive to to richness so if I'm at like 0.87 lambda say and basically
like 1.8 bar boost if I phase in more port injection so if I go from 30 to 50 percent of
total fueling the car will pick up like 15 wheel horsepower but if I stick with the direct injection
and I lean it out to 0.9 lambda then I pick up the same power interesting yeah and I've encountered
this a lot and I'm I'm never sure what to do about it on some cars I have exhaust temp sensors
because we definitely get up there in the temps and I've tried to I haven't been able to spend
as much time as I would like on figuring that out but something happens with the fuel mixing
and and and in that same by the same token if I'm at like 340 degrees of injection versus
355 degrees of injection timing when the direct injection starts fueling I can be at the same
lambda but again lose 10-15 horsepower from just that 15 degrees of of injecting it too late.
Yeah okay yeah I think it's fair to say my experience is much much more limited than yours.
I've really only had that experience with port and direct injection on an FA20 and it's just that
one data point so I wouldn't take too much from my own experience. What I think I see
is you could spend an eternity on the dyno because you've got so many different levers to pull,
you've got your injection timing, you've got your fuel pressure, you've got the split between
DI and port injection and then you've got your lambda target as well. So at each point in the
map you can sort of go around in this almost never-ending loop of iterations trying to.
And don't forget you have cam timing too. Oh cam timing too yeah. And the exhaust cam timing
will change the fuel volume relative to the lambda so it's like I do you have no idea I've
gone in freaking circles where I start to make progress and then I keep changing stuff and then
I come back around to going and I'm like wait how am I making 370 wheel and getting knock when I was
making 390 wheel and it was like perfect with more timing and at what point did I change something
that I didn't realize completely affected this. It is fascinating it's really hard on the new
or maybe I just don't know enough and I'm not good at this but it's tough on the new stuff because
there are so many levers to pull when you're starting to really push the engine. Yeah for sure.
You know it's easy at like 270 wheel if you're trying to make stock power 250 whatever that's no
problem but like you know on cars where I'm starting to push I've had one on the dyno up to 480
and 530 foot pounds of torque on just a stock B48 engine. That's impressive. The thing is so
crazy awesome and we're going to push it a little higher you know keep the torque down
a little lower but I mean that's the other thing now I think the stock rev limit on these is 7000
and I just had a car out this last weekend that we were pushing to 7800 and it's just like I've
had one guy rev it to 9500 accidentally and the thing's been fine. They're pretty amazing engines.
It does still amaze me how much headroom they usually, not always but usually is in some of
these factory engines. Just to come back I think to kind of round out what I was talking about
with my FA20 experience is I think when you start, when you've come from an entire career
of tuning port injected engines and you know if I tune at let's say 0.80, 0.78 lander at
1.5 bar of boost, the engine is most likely going to be absolutely just fine no matter how hard the
guy beats up on it. And you then start looking at the DIY world and you look at some of the
lander targets that these factory engines are using. It's a hard pass but I mean obviously
it's fine, the technology is very different. So I guess where I'm going with that is I've
probably always been a little bit conservative rather than wanting to chase these scary 0.90
lander targets with 1.5 bar of boost. And I know deep down that the engines are doing this,
manufacturers are doing this so it's just, I've kind of always been probably a little bit on the
side of caution there. I mean I've got all the data in the world as well. We've got individual
cylinder lambda and EGT, we did on that car, we don't own it anymore. So I had everything there
at my fingertips but at the end of the day we had the ability to make more power than the stock
engine and transmission was capable of handling. So it's like well I could push the boundaries,
maybe I could make the same power with 2, 3 PSI, less boost or something like that.
Or do I just leave it super conservative and be happy that the engine did 5, 8 years of laps
around racetracks and never gave us a moment's trouble? Well and I think that's the big thing
too because you see all these like, I call them dyno queens, but like the numbers that people
throw out for stuff on some of these new DI motors, but like it won't do that on the racetrack.
You know, tuning on the dyno and tuning on the racetrack is two so insanely different things.
And if you tried to run those lambda numbers for an entire, you know, a lap let alone
8 hours, it just melt the turbo. Oh yeah, well what an engine will handle for an 8 or 10 second
pull on the dyno is very different to a lap around a racetrack. Also one just saw an anecdotal
story when we were talking about injector characterisation. So the Toyota 86 package
from Motec comes with a start file. You can start it and drive it and it's actually pretty good.
And you know, we've modified from there and I'd fitted Injected Dynamics ID 1000 injectors.
So obviously good characterisation data with those from Paul Yor. And I knew that was right.
And this didn't matter but I'm fussy and it just absolutely frustrated me. If I changed,
if I had the VE table perfectly calibrated and I was hitting my lambda targets, if I went and
changed the PI to DI ratio, the lambda would be up. So the characterisation for the DI is wrong.
And coming back to what we were talking about before, I can't get the characterisation data
from anyone. And obviously Motec had the same issue because that's why it's wrong.
And I could have just left it because typically once the thing's tuned, you're not changing the
PI to DI ratio, it's just set. So you're building in a fudge factor and baking in some errors into
the VE table. But I mean yeah, if the engine runs and it hits its targets, really that's
what I care about. But I spent an eternity on our dyno and I basically tweaked the characterisation
for the direct injectors until I could go from a 0% DI to 100% DI and the lambda target stayed
rock solid. And you've got to change that relative to the fuel pressure. And it was a whole lot of
faff for absolutely nothing. But I felt good about it after that.
Yeah. Well, and I'm curious, what did you change in the characterisation to get it to,
because actually I still have that problem to a degree. And it's pretty close, but I,
and I don't, anyway, I'm just curious what you changed to get it to.
Yeah, I, honestly, I couldn't even tell you now that would have been, that would have been eight
to 10 years ago. Now, not long after we sort of moved to Queenstown. So yeah, and it's one
of those things like it pissed me off at the time. And then once I'd fixed it right onto the next
thing, I'll forget about that. So what I will do is once I remember, I'll have a look at my old
map for it. And maybe I'll flick your message and tell you what I changed. So I'm not trying
to hide anything from our audience. I just honestly can't remember.
No, no, no. I mean, there's stuff, dude, I've started taking notes when I tune this engine,
because like the boost control is so complicated on the pro firmware, especially if you're running a
very small turbo, it's like on the stock B 48, you can make 400 foot pounds of torque
at 2200 RPM. I mean, the turbo is instantaneous. And I've realized that I actually need an exhaust
back pressure sensor, because when the wastegate closes and transient, the mixture goes just pig
rich, like the engine loses all efficiency. But like getting that thing to, because the way that
it's got the boost, it's got the boost control system and the boost servo control system,
and they both have their own PID setups. And there's all these activation values,
especially so like at part throttle, I mean, it's comical, this engine will,
with a stock turbo, if you're at like 4% throttle, and it doesn't go into boost control,
it leaves the wastegate closed, it will just keep building boost up to, you know, a bar and a half,
like it'll just keep going, you're just like, what are you doing? I don't know why MoTek did
this, but for some reason, they've made the boost activation purely off throttle pedals. So
like if you don't push the throttle down far enough, it never goes into boost control, it just
just keeps climbing. That's an interesting choice. Which I don't think that counted on having such
a small turbo. No, no. It's interesting, one of the things I found when I started tuning the
torque base pro firmware on our 86, and the torque base firmware you can ask for whatever
torque you want. And I got into this situation where I was asking for, at a certain driver
pedal position, I was asking for way less torque than the engine could produce. So
the firmware closes the throttle, which is fine. But then you end up with a lot more,
the turbo's still making whatever it is, 25 psi of boost or something, or 24 psi of boost.
So I found that under those conditions, we want to actually incorporate EMAP into it because
you're seeing, as you were saying there, the lambda would be out the gate rich under those
conditions. It became a moot point because I don't really want to get into a situation where
I'm bringing the throttle down to 25% to meet my torque aim while I've still got 20 psi of boost.
So you incorporate your boost targets into your torque targets so that within reason,
you're always running maybe 70% throttle or something like that, you've still got that control,
but everything sort of lines up and makes sense, and that way the VE table remains accurate. Have
you sort of found anything like that with that torque based tuning? Yeah, and I should mention
the ones, the only car, the car's not running the stock turbo one, I'm running like GPA or
GPR firmware, which has proven to be extremely problematic in a lot of ways. I've tuned around
certain things, but I am on a path where I'm like, okay, I wish I had like an in-between of
pro and GPR, which is I keep saying they're making notes, I'm like, okay, I'm going to make my own
firmware for this thing. But on the torque stuff, the torque stuff is so useful, but so complicated
sometimes. And like what you're talking about, because you can sit there if you're running a
circuit racing car, that's amazing, I can make this thing so that it's got boost on tap at any
moment, but I can still limit the power. And I've gotten into a lot of situations where the system
starts chasing itself. The throttle is like, oh, I want less torque. And so it cuts it, but then
that causes the boost to fall. So then it increases it again, and the wastegate starts chasing, and
like everything starts chasing each other. And that's what I was saying with like, I'm writing
myself notes on this thing that I go back and read, because I forget, like I change all this
stuff, there's so many values, you know, you start changing Kalman gains, and you're like,
what the heck does this actually do? And you read the Motek thing, you're like, okay, I'll try that.
Well, that's not doing what I thought it was doing. You know, I just I just realized recently,
for example, that like, if the Kalman throttle gain is not 1000 is anything less than 1000,
then it's it over responds to stuff. And somehow on one map, I had because I had different maps
and different cars, I must have changed the Kalman gain thinking it was the other count,
the Kalman map gain, if you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, no one else will but this one.
Yeah, no, it's I mean, the stuff that's in there, you just keep going deeper and deeper and you're
like, dude, but it's funny, because at first I was like, why is this so complicated? Like this
doesn't really need to have all these different crazy values. But then I do find I get into a range
where I'm like, Oh, well, I needed to do this thing. And that's actually not an option. I want
boost margin should be adjustable based on RPM, not just a single value. I want you know, and
I wish there was more complication now. So yeah, it's such a, it's such a tight rope for them to
walk. And I think probably Motec, while I love the product, probably there's a little too far on
the side of over complexity. And I don't know where that that sort of happy medium actually sits,
because I consider myself to be a pretty advanced tuner and I like having as much control as possible.
So for me, the more levers I've got to pull, the better, because that's going to allow me,
as long as I know what I'm doing, to get the calibration better. But I know that for an average
tuner or a novice tuner who's just getting started, you open up an M1 tune and they're like,
what is this? And where do I even get started? And the problem I guess is that when you've got so
many different parameters that you need to dial in, it's very easy for someone to get themselves
so lost and so far out of the ballpark that they can't even get their way back.
So it's a difficult one. I mean obviously the Motec product probably is targeted more towards
professional motorsport than your average sort of lightly modified street car. It's not to say
you can't put it on one of those, but their target audience is probably normally a more
advanced tuner I would expect. Yeah I would think so. And I think yeah, if you have like,
if you're trying to learn tuning, certainly an M1 is not, I mean, GPA is not bad, but still,
you're going to get pretty lost. And I'm lucky, I started with an M800 and that's just the right
amount of complexity really. It was still overwhelming at the time, but looking back on it,
it's like it does what it needs to and not much, not way more. The first time I was tuning
acceleration enrichment and the whole idea of wall wedding, I was like, this is crazy.
Like, you know, like, and I thought that was some hyper advanced feature. Now I know it's
absolutely necessary for the thing to work on a port injected car. But I think like a link ECU is,
you know, a good amount of complexity. And that's, that's one of the reasons like, for me,
Motec is so complex, necessarily so with, especially with the new stuff, like, yeah,
if you're running like, I don't know, a BMW M54, like anything from mid 2000s, say, or late 90s,
and M1 is overkill. You don't, you don't need it to run that. But on the new stuff, it is
absolutely necessary. And like, like I use ECU master products as well. And they were trying
to get me to use one of their new DI boxes. And while I love their other stuff, I kind of look
through their firmware. And I was like, you know, I just, I'm just not interested in starting over
on this thing. Like, I think once you've got, once you've developed the knowledge on a product,
as doing exactly what you want it to do, you know, this is going to have to be a fairly specific
use case for then going and starting over again with something completely different.
I mean granted, cost may be part of that. But sometimes the cost saving is not worth the
features that you lose, or perhaps the learning curve that you have to go through in order to
get back to where you were. Yeah. And I think, like, kind of what I was going to say too is,
like they updated a MoTek 1.5, right? M12 and 1.5. And I loaded that and I looked at it and I was
like, I'm very keen to hear this story. Dude, forget it. Like I don't even, and I actually felt
like a, like a Luddite. And originally I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm that guy that's like, this is this
new, you know, I'm a carburetor guy and fuel injections for a bunch of, you know, the carburetor
works just fine. No, but I loaded that and I was like, dude, I know where everything is in 1.4.
I know all the hotkeys. Like I know I like the layout. I'm just going to stick with that.
Like it's, and it's... And have you? I have. Yeah. Okay. It's, I'm, I've delved into 1.5 a few times,
but I just... I'm in discussions with MoTek in Australia at the moment, because they would,
would dearly love us to produce some content around tune 1.5. And I've done exactly what
you've done. I've been using tune 1.4 for forever. And you know, to start with, if you've transitioned
from Haltech or Link or EC Master or anything, it's a lot to take in, you know, all of the different
workbooks and worksheets. It's, it's a lot. And you know, you slowly get used to it and understand
the workflow. And, you know, I do sort of find myself using all calibrate quite often to find a
parameter or a table. Every time it's all gone. And I think like that's, that's probably something
that MoTek see happening and they're like, OK well, if someone's continually going to
all calibrate, and for those, I'll just quickly explain, for those who don't know what the hell
we're talking about here, the MoTek tune software is very specific in what parameters and tables
are displayed. And sometimes you can't find on a particular worksheet what you're looking for.
So they have a tab called all calibrate, and this has got a search function. You type in what
you're looking for and it'll pre-populate with everything that's got that name in it. So that's
kind of how you find the things that you can't easily find. And as we're saying, most tuners
are using that all calibrate quite frequently. I think MoTek didn't like that. OK this means
that probably we've got work to do, which is where tune 1.5's come from. But it is, yeah did
exactly the same thing. I opened it up, had a play with it a few times. I could learn this new
system where I could stick to what I can do in my sleep because I know it inside and out,
backwards and forwards. But yeah maybe it's the carburetor, first is EFI thing, and maybe I just
need to man up and actually put in the time. Oh for sure, we both need to, but I also think that
unfortunately we have been doing this long enough that we know our ways, and that's true of everyone
in every industry. And I think someone who, some 20 year old who's getting into this who's starting,
absolutely use 1.5. And I should learn 1.5, but unfortunately when the car's on the dyno,
I need to tune the car. I can't sit there and mess around with some new software.
Speed and efficiency is important, yeah. Yeah and that's the exact same reason that I only
use MoTek. The ECU master stuff probably would run the engine OK, especially with some of the new
things they've come out with, but it doesn't matter. I know MoTek, I have packages for it,
I have all these different tunes, I have all this knowledge of what all the weird stuff does. So
it's like once you've put all that effort in, it doesn't make sense to keep reinvesting.
There's something to be said for constantly learning new things, but also you need to
learn the things that matter. Yeah, particularly when it's a business that you're running as well,
that is important. I quite often get asked, what ECU should I put in my car? And this is coming
from a standpoint of I'm not going to tune it myself, I'm going to take it to a professional
tuner. And my answer is always the same, you use the ECU that the tuner you've chosen suggests.
And they're not suggesting that ECU because they're making 40% commission on that versus
20% on something else. Most professional tuners, and I fell into this category as well, will align
themselves with, I was two ECUs, I was MoTek and I was Link, did a little bit of Haltech as well,
but at that time Haltech wasn't super popular in New Zealand. And I felt that those two products
basically covered the price points that my customer base would accept and gave the features
and usability that I needed for both ends of that market. And there would have been another
dozen ECUs out there that would have probably also fit the bill. But the problem was I knew
the Link ECU and the MoTek 100 series inside out and I could get the job done quickly.
And because I knew those ECUs so well, I was able to provide better results. Someone could have
bought me in a car fitted with a $20,000 Bosch Motorsport ECU. And A, I wouldn't know where to
get started. And B, because I don't know the system as well as I know these other two, I'd
probably almost certainly provide an inferior result despite the expense of the ECU. So my
long-winded point here is take the advice of your professional tuner. They're probably going to have
a product that's going to fit your budget and the requirements of your engine and vehicle.
And not trying to stitch you up because they're going to make more money on a particular ECU,
you're just going to get a better result. Does that sort of fit your experience as well?
Totally. And the hardware cost often is just a fraction. The hardware cost difference, I should
say, between two ECUs is a fraction of what the total project is. And if you come out with a 30%
worse result because you saved $600 on a cheaper ECU, it's like, what was the point of the whole
thing to begin with? But man, I made the mistake of thinking that I could easily just learn software.
Engines and engine is just an interface otherwise. But the architecture in the background of ECU
and how obviously fuel and timing or whatever, but as you get more advanced on engines,
things get a lot more complicated. And I did Cyvex, especially because I went down the plug
and play route for stuff, which was kind of a mistake. But Link had their E36 plug and play.
Cyvex had E92. And I've done Cosworth. I've done freaking... The Bosch one was a nightmare.
The Haltech, AEM, a bunch of S54s at AEMs, those were awful. Those had so many weird problems.
That's the other thing with the hardware too. MoTeX is so reliable. Their hardware is so
freaking reliable. And I've seen so many weird problems with other ECUs. AEM was a big one where
the throttle drivers kept failing in them. But yeah, they kept having all kinds of weird
issues. And AEM did warranty a lot of them, but that was a constant issue that would ruin
people's race weekends. The thing would just go into lint mode.
Yeah. The fact that you're getting a warranty on it is helpful, but that's not going to help you
on the day when your throttle fails on the racetrack.
Yeah. And most people can only go to the racetrack six, seven, eight times a year. So it's like you...
I mean, it depends, obviously. But if you're going to spend the money on a standalone ECU,
the $800 difference that they saved on the AEM. But I will say that it was...
There's a lot to be said for plug-and-play stuff because wiring is hard. Wiring is consistently
hard. 100%. Yeah. I think it solves a lot of problems for a lot of people and almost always
it's going to be a cheaper way of getting your car onto a standalone if you go plug and play.
Yeah. The ECU might be... It's usually going to be a little bit more money than just a universal
wiring. But yeah, as soon as you have to factor in the wiring cost.
One thing I've thought about on that too, because we're making a plug-and-play
harness for the B48. And originally, I was like, yeah, we can just take the stock harness,
cut the end off, put it into the Motec. It's not that hard to do. But I sold four packages that
went to other people where they did the wiring. And every single time I logged into that ECU,
it was like, oh, look, there's like 32 little air flags here. I've gotten really good at logging
into those ECUs on my firmware or my package and being like, yeah, this is wrong. Here's a
list of things. Go do that. Call me back when you're done. And I'm always proud of the fact that
pretty much the first time they hit the start switch, the thing starts right up after fixing
all those problems. But every single one... And these are guys that generally know what they're
doing, but there's so many wires on these things. So much room for error. Yeah. And it's hard. I
mean, it's just hard. So yeah, so we're doing Motec plug-and-play harnesses for these where you'll
just be able to plug the thing in. And I provide the software and you start it and you're going to go.
So basically, fold a transmission onto the back of it, build some engine mounts and go racing.
Well, we make the engine mounts too. We actually were making a full... If you actually go to our
website, we now make a... We have a huge document that tells you how to put this engine in an E46
and the E36. It tells you the coolant fittings and the plumbing and how it's all... It's a complete
work through. What transmission you can use. There's different ones. Obviously, we're trying
to sell people hard parts for that. But we make the Valtronic lockout, the engine mounts,
trans mounts, like a thermostat delete for the M122. Are you familiar with the heat
the heat management module stuff on these? I'm not. Yeah, that was something really interesting.
The new engine. So when we're running the M142, unfortunately, the pro firmware is able to do
this somewhat recently. Instead of a thermostat, there's a dual H-bridge ball valve that turns
back and forth to direct coolant down different passages. And then it uses a sent signal for
its position instead of a normal analog. So literally, to get that work the first time,
because I didn't use Pro for more on the very first car, just because I didn't realize it,
we ran out of H-bridge outputs because there's so many on the motor. So we had a separate module
that would... The display would take the position of the thermostat and then it would send a signal
to this separate ECU master dual H-bridge module and that would then tell the thermostat what to
So fortunately, the pro firmware runs that thing perfectly. But on the new stuff, we also then now
we've made like a thermostat delete or HMM delete that just makes it into a normal thermostat that
can just be pulsed with modulated basically. So I think probably for a race car that actually
makes more sense, keep it as simple as you can. Sometimes wins the day. Yeah, yes and no. Only in
that I love parts that are factory. Like people hate on factory parts all the time, but they're
like, oh, it's plastic. It's going to break. And I'm like, to me, that's lightweight and
easily replaceable. That's what that looks like to me. So that stuff does fail on cars that have
100,000 miles on them, but like... Of course. This engine has been... There's a lot of plastic
parts in the engine, but that's part of what makes it light. And again, anything that we can
not change that I can take that thing from a junkyard, stick it in the car and go run it.
I am intent on leaving that unless we absolutely have to change. Yeah, that does make a lot of
sense. Yeah, too many people are intent on, they want to delete the oil filter housing and it's
like, okay, so you're going to have a plate with lines and a separate filter with more lines,
with more... Like how many failure points do you have versus like... It hates more failure points.
Yeah. Yeah. So I know that from experience. You change stuff and there's so many unintended
consequences when you change things. So BMW has different reasons to engineer stuff different
ways, but they're really good engineers. They build nice stuff and people are like,
that's stupid. I don't know why they did that. And I'm like, that's because you don't understand
what they're doing. They're not stupid. You just don't know what they're doing.
Yeah. Everything is done for a very specific engineering reason. We just don't necessarily
have insight into what the engineers were thinking when they designed a certain part.
Exactly. Hey look Brett, we are now coming up towards 2 hours 20, I believe. And I think
of my 10 or 12 talking points, we've managed to get through a whopping 3 or maybe 4.
So it's clear to me that we're never going to get through the rest of this and I do want to
respect your time here. So my suggestion is we're going to wrap this one up here and now.
And what we're going to do is reschedule you somewhere in the future and we're going to get
you back to cover off all the other stuff that I really still want to dive into because there's
just so much here that is interesting. Hopefully everyone who's been, well if you've made it this
far, chances are you've probably also been interested by it. So Brett, we've got the same
three questions we ask all of our guests. And the first of those, what's next in the future for you?
We're really, we've done a lot of like race support and other stuff. So I'm actually,
I've learned a lot unfortunately. So we're doing, we're a lot more focused on engineering and parts,
like hard parts. We're making suspension pieces. We just made a billet upright for the E46 and
and then the B48, we will do B58 stuff soon, but I just haven't, haven't needed to in a sense. We've
had so many projects with the B48 and I've been having a lot of fun with that and we're putting
it into some street cars and stuff now. So yeah, we're focused on making a lot of parts and then
a lot of B48 stuff and making it, you know, super plug and play for people because I think it's
great. All right, next question. Is there any advice you'd give to a younger version of yourself
to help reach where you are today and your career faster? Two super big takeaways is one, if you've
put in a lot of work, like know your value, know that you've, if you've truly put in the work,
don't sell yourself short on like what you're capable of and what you're worth and what your
services are worth because this industry is very hard. And if you have, if you've put in that time,
then you should appropriately charge for it is honestly a big one. And then beyond that is
really think through anything that you're planning on doing, think through the next couple steps,
not get excited about the thing that's in front of you and what you want to do with it, but really
like what's it mean after that? And, you know, just as a short, like a short aside, and we'll
probably talk about it on the next one, but the B46 race cars that we did, there was some amazing
things that we've done with those cars and we've built 13 of them. It's an amazing car, but we,
we didn't, I didn't think through a couple later steps of what building those cars meant. And
the things that we were going to be reliant on to build them. So really, really long-term planning,
I guess, but like always like what's the next step after that? Well, what's that mean? And yeah,
that would have been smart a number of times in my life. I think that's great advice. I'd probably
temper that with the fact that sometimes you sort of, how do you put it, maybe you don't know what
you don't know, it's hard to kind of gaze into that crystal ball and see all those steps. But you
can only do what you can and I think the important takeaway from your point though is at least if
you're thinking in that way, like what are these next steps, rather than just living in the here
and now, that's definitely smart advice. Yeah, you're still going to get caught out for sure.
Of course, yeah, maybe caught out less. Yeah. I think with your point about knowing your value
as well, I mean, that's certainly something that I fell into that when I was at the start of my career.
I was doing some tuning just on the side while I was studying for my Masters and I was doing a
lot of tuning for some local rally cars and I kind of almost felt like maybe like an imposter
and definitely wasn't charging at that point what my services were worth. So yeah, I think,
also I think if you're charging yourself out at a rate that's too low, there's sort of perceived
value around price point. So if you're charging out yourself too low, you're charging $500
for a tune and everyone locally's $1,000, almost people look at that and are like, oh it can't
possibly be any good if it's $500, so you're almost shooting yourself in the foot there anyway.
I think. Yeah. And you'll still get, the thing is you have to realize that you're going to get,
you're still going to get people that are like, well, that's too much, that's ridiculous, I can't
believe, but they're wrong and they weren't going to pay $200. Those people don't matter,
you know what I'm saying? Yeah. You can't keep everyone happy and nor should you try.
No. And I think it is important to realize exactly what you just said, I had the same issue with
with feeling or putting in the time to solve problems and then you get, you fix the problem
and you're like, oh, well, I guess I should have known that, I should have done that first, you
know, only to realize that like, no, you had to go through the steps and it's unlikely someone
else could have figured it out faster. You got to charge for it. So. Absolutely. I think that
where that goes almost the other way though is where you come into a job and, you know,
someone's been driven crazy by this problem that no one's been able to fix and they've
poured hours and hours into it. So look at it, look through the thing and I know what the
issue is and you've fixed it in five minutes. And so what do you do? Do you build them for
the five minutes of time or the 20 years of experience that you've gained along the way?
It's a tough one. Yeah. All right. Our last question for today, Brett, if people want to
follow you and find out more about what you're up to, how they're best to do so.
Instagram, strong motorsports and I'm starting to be more active on YouTube. I'm starting to
make some more content and try and actually share some of the... I feel like I come across so many
super interesting things and I see some of these other channels that just cover hyper basic stuff
over and over. And I'm trying to do a little bit more of sharing some of my knowledge now
and just do some videos. I just did a video on Belchronic. So YouTube is steadily becoming
more active on that. And then our website, strongmotorsports.com, is where I'm probably going
to hire a media guy soon because I'm not good at it. And I get so busy with the technical stuff
and the clients and everything else. So I'm at a point where it's like, okay, we're actually
selling product, but I'm not putting anything out there. So yeah. Okay. Well, as always,
we'll chuck those links in the show tonight. So it's easy for people to find you.
Look, Brett, it's been an incredibly interesting chat. Like I say, I would like to have kept on
going but we want to respect your time so absolutely we'll have you back. But thank you
for sharing your story with us today. No thank you, I really appreciate it, it was a lot of fun.
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